The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 4 of 5 The Laugh

Imagine him happy

Camus leaves the damned man at the foot of the mountain and insists we imagine him smiling.

The reading — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The Myth of Sisyphus

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.

Perennial 1942 CE Open this teaching on the Map →
The framing

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Camus wrote this in occupied France, having opened the book with the sentence that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that it is suicide. His answer is Sisyphus: the man condemned to roll the stone up forever and watch it roll back. Camus refuses to rescue him. There is no god in the essay, no afterlife, no reason. There is the stone, the mountain, and the walk back down.

And then the turn, which is the whole course: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not consoled. Not resigned. Happy, in the walk down, because the struggle is his and the universe without a master is neither sterile nor futile. Notice that Camus arrived here by refusing every religious answer, and that he arrived at the same face the Buddha wears. Read this beside the half-smile. The atheist and the sage are making the same expression, for reasons that turn out to be the same reason.

Carry with you
What stone did you walk back down to today, and was there anything in the walk that was yours?