Reading The Myth of Sisyphus

The easiest and largest way to misread The Myth of Sisyphus is to read it like a self-help book. The reason I got interested in revolt was because Rieux in The Plague was ridiculously cool.

All this is unrelated to heroism. It is simply a matter of integrity. The thought may sound laughable, but the only way to fight the plague is integrity.

I thought what was cool was the steadiness shown in carrying out, in silence, what looks impossible. So I started reading The Myth of Sisyphus thinking it might serve as a guide for how to live.

But Camus pins it down at the very beginning of the book: his book is not that kind.

What the reader will find here is only a description, in its pure state, of an illness the human spirit suffers. For now, no metaphysics, no faith is involved. This is the limit of this book and its only choice.

The Myth of Sisyphus is not a book that recommends some model life. Sisyphus is more like the figure that remains after following “the absurd sensibility” all the way through. He is not an example to follow. Once you accept that, it becomes clear that lifting “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” — the last sentence — into your own personal motto is impossible.

There is a metaphysical happiness one can taste by sustaining the absurdity of the world. Conquest or acting, countless loves, absurd revolt — these are the tributes a human being pays to his own dignity on a battlefield where defeat was set in advance.

Life is a battlefield where defeat was set in advance. The happiness Camus mentions, very sparingly in this book, can’t be the feeling that things are going well, nor the conviction that hard work will eventually mean something. It is a state where, while accepting all the unhappiness it promises and while understanding the absurd, one still does not give up that life.

The absurd is precisely the confrontation between this irrationality and the wild longing for clarity.

For Camus, the absurd is not a property of the world itself but a collision between human beings and the world. Humans want meaning and explanation. The world does not answer. So the very thought “this kind of person looks great, so I should become this kind of person — the book is heavier than I expected, but maybe I can pick up some ‘lesson’ from it that lets me handle my own work calmly and diligently?” already presupposes a clear answer to how to live. To read this book well is to develop into the realization that no such answer exists from the start.

Revolt is the constant confrontation between man and his own darkness. Revolt is not yearning. Revolt has no hope.

Revolt has no hope. Revolt is the state where no consoling story is allowed in. Reading Camus or Nietzsche, you can find consolation in the very fact that you have a role model and you only need to advance along that single path. But Camus’s revolt classifies all such consolations as escape and as leap. Self-help calls postponing present happiness for effort an “investment.” Religion calls death “eternal life.” Someone’s comfort calls failure “something that will turn out to mean something later.” Putting another name on what is crushing you, to make it sacred, is all leap.

So Camus speaks of quantity over quality of life. What matters is to be conscious as much as possible, to experience as much as possible. The reason actor and conqueror appear as figures of the absurd man is the same. Both are people who do not submit to fate but push the present forward by their own force. Painfully so.

I think about Sisyphus now. What Camus pays attention to is not the scene of pushing the rock, but the moment after the rock has rolled back down, when Sisyphus walks back down the mountain. In that moment, Sisyphus knows the futility of his labor and whose labor it is.

Sisyphus’s silent joy is here, entirely. His fate is his own. His rock is his own.

You can think about ownership of life from this. This ownership does not mean general freedom or happiness. Making your own life your own does not make life better. It can become heavier, lonelier. Sisyphus is the human being who never once stops carrying that weight.

The freedom Camus speaks of is similar. It sounds a bit funny when I put it like this, but he is talking about the freedom to admit that what we have believed to be freedom was, in fact, another form of bondage.

But at the same time, the absurd man realizes that he has been living, until now, bound to the premise of freedom and feeding on its illusion. In a certain sense, that was bondage to him. By setting some goal for his life, he was conforming to the demand of the goal he wanted to reach, and so he made himself a slave of freedom.

Self-definitions like good father, good employee, must succeed in some field — these make us live up to that image. What we believed was free self-determination was, in fact, using the present as a tool for some image of a future human being. And that becomes setting some direction inside this absurd life, and it is all useless.

The absurd makes this clear to me: tomorrow does not exist. From now on, this is the deep reason for my freedom.

Freedom is not something you can be giddy about. Not the financial-freedom kind. If humans, especially in Korea, have lived their lives goal-driven, almost every motivation sits on the opposite side of what Camus calls freedom. If you put down the picture and the plan of the human being you intend to become, what is left of life? Looking into that place is not pleasant and does not make you happy. Sisyphus’s life never looks like a life worth recommending. It is closer to the figure of a human being that remains after refusing both suicide and the leap through religion. To put it a bit too sharply, suicide or religion might be the happier life.

Can a human being live without appealing to salvation? That is the question that consumes my entire interest.

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

Sisyphus looked tremendously great to me, and at the same time I did not want to come close. I just want to work moderately hard and live moderately happy. I will spend my interest searching, as far as possible, for an answer within the human world and increasing my own pleasures.