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The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

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.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

---Albert Camus

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Whether the earth
or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound
indifference.

(I love this line)

To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other
hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not
worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas
or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a
reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore
conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those
that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the
passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought:
the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely
the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve
simultaneously emotion and lucidity.

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One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.

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The mind’s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is
false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first
discovers is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in
this case. Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and
more elegant demonstration of the business than Aristotle: “The
often ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy
themselves. For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of
the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own
thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true).
And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we
declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that
solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an
infinite number of true or false judgments. For the one who
expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true,
and so on ad infinitum.”

This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind
that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity
of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the
plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above
all, to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate
operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his
universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human,
stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of
the anthill. The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no
other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality
can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.
If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he
would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering
mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them
up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be
seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be
but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for
the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.
But the fact of that nostalgia’s existence does not imply that it is to
be immediately satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates
desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the
One (whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction
of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its
own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other
vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes.

These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not
interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be
deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is
mortal. One can nevertheless count the minds that have deduced
the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to consider as a
constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between
what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent
and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which,
if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced
with this inextricable contradiction of the mind, we shall fully
grasp the divorce separating us from our own creations. So long as
the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes,
everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia.
But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite
number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding.
We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface
which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of
inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware
that this is true for all our knowledge. With the exception of
professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If
the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it
would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its
impotences.

Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This
heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I
can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my
knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self
of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is
nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by
one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have
been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these
silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added
up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable
to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the
content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled.
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic,
there are truths but no truth. Socrates’”Know thyself” has as much
value as the “Be virtuous” of our confessionals. They reveal a
nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile
exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so
far as they are approximate.

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and
I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain
evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate this world
whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth
will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You
describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its
laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You
take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage
you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be
reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the
electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you
tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons
gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an
image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall
never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have
already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me
everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in
metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need
had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand
of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have
returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can
seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that,
apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my
finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice
between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and
hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger
to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that
negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I
can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the
appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To
will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as
to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by
thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is
absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear; I
was waiting for proof and longing for it to be right. But despite so
many pretentious centuries and over the heads of so many eloquent
and persuasive men, I know that is false. On this plane, at least,
there is no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason,
practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain
everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have
nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth, which
is to be enchained. In this unintelligible and limited universe,
man’s fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals
has sprung up and surrounds him until his ultimate end. In his
recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd
becomes clear and definite. I said that the world is absurd, but I
was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that
can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this
irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the
human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.
For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one
to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is
all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my
adventure takes place. Let us pause here. If I hold to be true that
absurdity that determines my relationship with life, if I become
thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in face of the
world’s scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of
a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must
see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all, I must
adapt my behavior to them and pursue them in all their
consequences. I am speaking here of decency. But I want to know
beforehand if thought can live in those deserts.

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