“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
—the famous ending sentence of Albert Camus’ essay on absurdism and suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus
Sisyphus was a figure in Greek mythology, who was cursed by the gods to an eternity of pushing a heavy boulder up a hill—enchanted in such a manner that it would always come back down, keeping poor Sisyphus in an eternal loop of almost accomplishing his goal, and having it elude his grasp forever and ever. It is of course a symbol for the perennial human predicament of needing to participate in laborious, mundane tasks over and over again, just to keep going on doing things that end up necessitating doing the mundane things again and again. The cases of the Mondays, and so forth.
As I am rather sure that most of us can relate to the dreadful feeling of realizing the repetitive nature of ever so many of the realities of human life, how exactly could we ease ourselves? How do we imagine Sisyphus happy?
I propose we inquire into the state of reality as it is.
—
As seen from the earth, the sun rises and sets in a rhythmic sequence, marking the passing of terrestrial time. This rising and setting of the sun happens to be one of the ways the myth of Sisyphus has been interpreted: one could imagine a solar deity figure pushing the sun to the apex of the sky from the East at morning, and having it fall back down from the West after noon into the evening and night, only for the deity to have to do it all over again the next morning.
But when we really get into it, it seems that this kind of circular process of going up and down is actually rather essential to the constitution of the universe in which we live. Every celestial body in our solar system, and beyond, goes around in circles.
It’s not limited to the macroscale of the cosmos; it is verily observable in the microscales of the constitutions of physical life. Seen from the minutest particles, we conclude based on our refined scientific observations that it is constituted of vibration—atoms, particles or wavicles, depending on the scale of observation and frame of interpretation, going up and down very rapidly in repetition. Our sensory perception, too, is nothing but resonance between sources of vibration going up and down, making our sensory apparatuses dance to their rhythm, up and down. A harp’s strings are plucked, they vibrate up and down in a rapid fashion, they make our eardrums vibrate to the same rhythm, and the vibration of our eardrums gets translated into beautiful music in our brains.
Indeed, there seems to be something absolutely essential about the pattern of going up and down. So perhaps we can conclude that that is not the root cause of Sisyphus’ predicament—then we would have to conclude that the universe in which we live is just absurdly insane (which was basically concluded by the absurdist philosophers). No, I refuse to do that—it is rather the way in which we relate to it that makes us insanely absurd.
What made Sisyphus miserable was not what he was doing, but that he was doing it with a goal in his mind. His goal was to permanently get the boulder to the top of the hill, and the gods teased and tormented him exactly by taking advantage of this. He could have outsmarted the gods easily by ceasing to care, and instead finding delight in the repetition of the process—in the same way that a dog tirelessly and with unending enthusiasm finds joy in catching or fetching a stick over and over again.1
“The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Why do you think the sun rises and sets each day? Do you think the myriad things in this universe going in an up-down sequence in an infinitely interconnected way are doing it because they have a goal to accomplish? No. They do it because it’s fun. They are not, like mankind, subject to the original sin of falling into temporality, of obfuscating the joy of the eternal present moment with conditioned imaginations about future fulfillments or comparisons to past memories. Eternity is a curse only when viewed through the lens of temporality; infinity is a curse only when viewed through the lens of finitude.
The seemingly absurd nature of existence is actually entirely in the futility of this attempt to project our ideas of reason and progress into it and seeing eventually it all crumble into where it came from—in expecting it to behave in ways it simply does not behave. Camus’ despairing over the “unreasonable silence” as the universe’s answer to man’s inquiries about the ultimate meaning is itself what is unreasonable—to expect the vast infinitude of the universe to answer in our terms, instead of us learning to listen to it on its terms.
When you accord yourself with existence, and are really “grooving with the eternal Now,”2 you will instantly realize how easy it could be for Sisyphus to be happy.
Thank you for reading.
I have already used this analogy (and quoted from the same part of Orthodoxy) in this essay, which is very much related to this one. I recommend reading both works.