Welcome
back, everybody. All, like, three of
you. Today, we’re gonna talk about Camus
again: some excerpts from his “The Myth
of Sisyphus,” and the first two thirds or so of The Fall. I’ll focus on the
former, as I hope all y’alls got a pretty good estimation of my thoughts on the
latter from our presentation this week.
I admit that
I was kind of perplexed by our class discussion on “The Myth of Sisyphus,”
because nobody even seemed to mention what I read as the entire point of the
essay. Sisyphus is an allegory, of
course--for the Greeks, demonstrating the folly of trying to cheat death, but
for Camus, demonstrating something else entirely. Sisyphus is damned to pursue a pointless task
for eternity: endlessly pushing a boulder
up a mountain. In most versions of the
myth, he doesn’t even ever get a break, either because the mountain goes on
forever or because he’s got to exert all his strength just to keep the rock
from rolling down the hill and crushing him.
With an allegorical agenda in mind, then, it doesn’t make much sense to
me to speak of Sisyphus without his rock, or any such thing; without the rock,
he wouldn’t be anybody we care about. Sisyphus is “the guy with the rock.” As a fictional construct, that’s his entire
point; his eternal, pointless struggle is what gives his story meaning.
So, then, what
is that meaning? As I said, for the
Greeks, the meaning was, “Death has to happen,” or thereabouts. Pushing the rock is Sisyphus’s punishment for
seeking to defy the natural order. But
Camus…Camus doesn’t read it as a punishment.
“We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he says. Why?
Here’s why: because Sisyphus is all of us. All our effort, all our triumphs and travails
and petty victories and defeats, accomplish precisely nothing in the grand
scope of time. Ashes to ashes, dust to
dust; the universe grinds on, indifferent to our little lives. It may take a decade or a century or a millennium
or ten, but all we do will be forgotten—and that’s if we assume that it ever
meant anything to begin with (which I don’t; or, at least, it means nothing
inherently). In light of that, we’ve got
two options: declare that it’s not worth
the effort, that is, kill ourselves, or continue to meaninglessly push the
meaningless rock.
Now, I
think Camus and I come to the same answer—that is, I’ll keep pushing the rock,
not because I think the universe cares, but because I care, and I derive
satisfaction from it; but the character of that satisfaction differs
somewhat. For Camus, it’s defiance; it’s
spitting in the face of that indifferent machine that we all live in and are
part of, raging, not against the dying of the light, but against the fact that
there was never any light to begin with.
Here’s where I break from Camus.
See, I don’t think there’s anything there to defy in the first
place. How can one fight the universe’s
indifference? It will, definitionally,
mean nothing. Besides, it’s not like it’s
something to be overcome; it’s nothing.
A blank canvas, not a mountain to climb or an opponent to fell. Why should the choice to continue living be defiance,
or struggle, or war? Why shouldn’t it be
a celebration?
As I
implied last time, I’ve got to get by and feel good about myself without
appealing to inherent worth—not because I think I’m inherently less worthwhile
than anyone else, but because I don’t think inherent
worth exists at all. I realize that
might seem dark, and dismal, but to me, it’s really not. To me, the act of making meaning, reading it
onto the meaningless nothing that is everything, is a thing of beauty; it is
the essence of art and creation. I
justify living by the fact that I think living is pretty awesome. It’s fun, and compelling, and poignant, and
bittersweet, at turns—but it’s always wondrous and beautiful, if I have just
the courage to embrace it.
I’ve been
suicidal before—just last semester, in fact, though I only once even felt like
I could actually do the deed. Injured
and isolated, bereft of my main source of self-esteem (my athletics, because
they’re the hardest), I felt not only unloved but unlovable, not only sorrowful
but incapable of happiness. The
overwhelming feeling was one of nothingness.
I couldn’t care, and when I could, I almost drowned in a sea of maudlin
self-pity and self-hate. The thing is,
though, even in the darkest depths of my despair, when I got up and looked
loathing in the mirror five mornings out of every week, when I couldn’t walk
past a high place without fantasizing of leaping off, when I felt worthless and
alone and undesirable and pathetic, there was still always the potential and
the ability to get better. To find
happiness again, to find self-esteem again, to rediscover that I can do what I
love, and love what I do. And, as it
turns out, I do.
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