The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus(1942)
Extract
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
A man pushes a boulder up a mountain, watches it roll back down, and walks after it again, and in that descent Albert Camus finds not despair but the beginning of philosophy. Published in 1942 while France lay under occupation, this essay opens with the declaration that the only truly serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Camus examines suicide with the precision of a doctor and arrives at a defiant conclusion: the absurd, once recognized, must be lived rather than escaped. The universe offers no meaning, and therefore we must create our own, not through hope or faith but through lucid revolt. Sisyphus, walking downward in full awareness, becomes the hero of consciousness. One must imagine him happy.
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Camus puts the philosophy into practice: Rieux pushes his boulder through the epidemic and does not stop.
Marcus Aurelius arrived at the same acceptance two millennia earlier, but called it duty instead of absurdity.
Beckett stages the absurd condition Camus describes: two men who keep going without reason or hope.