View Single Post
Old 04-10-2011, 11:37 AM
  # 1 (permalink)  
JohnBarleycorn
Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 270
The Myth of Sisyphus

Hello all? Anyone here read "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus?

It is available in many places online, but there is a copy that has been on Professor Julia Evergreen Keefer's of NYU for a long time, available here:

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

It is very short, but I find a lot of inspiration from it sometimes in this often seemingly absurd quest some call recovery.

What are your thoughts?

Some quotes:

The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy...

When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises 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.
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 effort will henceforth be unceasing...

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that silent pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes 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...

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Some of the professor's questions would be applicable:
What is it about your "recovery" that resembles Sisyphus' plight?

What is your relationship to your rock?

Is the struggle itself enough for you?
JohnBarleycorn is offline