It is up to us to imagine Sisyphus happy.I was intrigued by “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus when I first knew about it. Whether we accept our fate is sealed or choose to see the most mundane circumstances differently, the choice is an existential choice. This existential fragility focuses on the relationship between circumstances. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus reminds us that we face a radical challenge in each moment to imagine Sisyphus happy. The art of failure is recognizing with Camus that “there is no sun without shadow and it is essential to know the night.” Sisyphus not only defied death, literally placing Thanatos in chains, he revolted against the despair of his existence. That - not balance, but strange arrangement - is games, the art of failure.” Jesper Juuls finds this freedom in games: “The illusive space of games is to be protected, but it must always come with an additional license for us to be just a little angry, and more than a little frustrated. Jesper Juuls, in his 2013 essay, The Art of Failure,: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. And Camus says “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.” In the very moment you recognize despair, you confront truth. There is power in coming to this point of despair when you recognize that your deepest fears came true. It’s the heaviness that Christ felt when he went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night that Judas betrayed him – the gravity of despair enveloped him to the point that he sweat drops of blood.Ĭamus writes, “The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. It’s what Milan Kundera calls the unbearable lightness of being. The rock, here, is the weight of despair. “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.” This is precisely how Camus reads this Greek myth: In her book, The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Sarah Lewis intuits the possibilities that come from reorienting our thinking toward failure: So what does it take to imagine Sisyphus happy?Īccording to Camus, there is a kind of triumph that we find in the myth of Sisyphus, but in order to recognize it, you have to look closely. 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.”Īnd if we face meaningless tasks like Sisyphus, we have the same choice that he did. That hour like a reathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. 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. “It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. He finds something peculiar in the moment Sisyphus turns around: You reach the top of the hill only to discover the boulder rolls back down and you have to start again.Īccording to Camus, this is where it gets interesting. Imagine living for all of eternity baring a burden so magnanimous. When the Greek gods condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of hard labor, rolling a boulder up a hill, he, too, was given this choice. In one of his most insightful essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus recognizes that when a person confronts the absurd circumstances of life, they can react in one of two ways: either they fall into despair, which most of us know as existential angst, or they revolt.
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