#2 Sisyphus, the Absurd Hero
As I attempt to articulate my thoughts, I am humbled by just how difficult it is to capture the essence of ideas through language. Whenever I follow a train of thought, I realise my ideas fork off onto a thousand paths, forcing me to obscure the whole landscape as I squeeze my flowing thoughts into something rigid. I am yet to arrive at a place to resolve this strain, nor do consider it possible. I have to remind myself that I am not trying to explain the entire cosmos but only use words to excavate my thoughts. For now, I will float downstream.
There is an old story my mind wanders to in the quiet hours of the day. It was told that the Greek king Sisyphus of Corinth, anointed by Homer as “the most cunning of men”, managed to cheat death twice and caused pandemonium on earth. As punishment for his transgression, he was sentenced by Zeus to push a formidable boulder up a steep hill, only to have the stubborn rock roll back down so that he must repeat this meaningless task for all of eternity. This predicament Sisyphus finds himself in does not at first appear particularly relatable to our lives. Until I came across the great existentialist philosopher Albert Camus a few years back when I was searching for ways to understand life and all the ways it confounded me. To Camus, the myth of Sisyphus represented something far greater than its original intent. It is a depiction of our existence distilled down to its essence. Camus writes this poignant passage:
“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
If I ask myself that “why” enough times, I arrive at a place where our lives cannot be measured with any objective certainty. We clean only to have our homes dirty again, we work only to die without our belongings or fleeting accomplishments. Many generations will continue to do this only for the sun to one day explode and wipe the last remanence of our existence from this place. It will be as though we were never here. This realisation is deeply overwhelming to me. If everything we do is without meaning beyond ourselves, what would be the point of doing anything at all? Many of us circumvent this malady by a leap of faith towards a fixed ideology that reimagines our existence as a set of fixed and predetermined rules. These beliefs soothe our nausea by promising external meaning and certainty when faced with the staggering nature of reality - always threatening to swallow us whole if we allow our minds to stay for too long.
I wholeheartedly understand the desire to have certainty. I believe this is why movies, tv shows, games and stories have always been so alluring to me. Within these confined worlds, as complex as they may be, the boundaries are intelligible. There is a beginning, an end and a manageable set of rules in between. I recognise in myself a persistent desire for certainty and for many years, I was convinced I had found it. Yet, for reasons hidden from me, I have never been able to get beyond the apprehension that all of these decrees, many of them very old, were once made up by a human born as clueless as I am.
Camus’ Sisyphus makes no attempts to resolve this absurd nature of reality. He offers no finality to this dilemma. Instead, he advocates for something quite the opposite. In Camus’ view, Sisyphus was only condemned to perform his arduous task but he was not doomed to despise his existence. Perhaps it is this dogged need for certainty, the endless seeking for the panacea of meaning, that shackles and truncates us. Camus famously proclaimed
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Too often do I treat moments in my life as just a vehicle, a means to arrive at some greater end that will help me capture objective purpose. This transactional way of living life seeps into our most sacred places. Before we have a chance to fall in love with an idea, a person or a passion, we twist and bend so that they may fit into arbitrary confines. We willfully blind ourselves to the worth of things in their own right. Inevitably, when we arrive at our imagined destination, we invariably realise it wasn’t as certain or meaningful as we thought and we begin our futile search again.
“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
Camus’ Sisyphus is not a tale of despair but heroic revolt. The tension I feel when I realise that whatever I choose to do, it will be as lacking in a grand purpose as anyone else is sobering. Camus reminds us that this does not have to be resolved by imposing a false reality, a kind of ‘philosophical suicide’. Instead, it can be acknowledged, experienced and embraced. This gives us the freedom to savour the transitory moments, to see the beauty within the cracks and white spaces. To do things for their own sake, enjoy our pursuits as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. To relentlessly affirm the lack of a pre-ordained, pre-packaged purpose for all of us paradoxically emancipates us to freely imbue a personal sense of purpose into every action we choose to take. When we realise this, the freedom is dizzying.
As I imagine the stone inevitably rolling back down the hill, Camus writes
“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
Camus’ Sisyphus has an enduring allure for me. It seems to capture the essence of our condition. It also treads the fine line between acknowledging our predicament while not promising to deliver us from it with false certainty. Despite this, I don’t feel as though I have arrived at a destination. Even as I write these words, I feel the persistent longing for an ultimate conclusion. To neatly capture all my swirling thoughts and turn them into something static and final. It takes a moment of silence to recompose myself and understand that the process of casting light on my thoughts and transforming them into words is enough to fill my heart.
