Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, at the age of 44.
In his novels, essays and newspaper articles, he turns against the certainty of convictions,
dogmatic statements and the desire for ideological truths.
According to him, nothing was ever completely bad or completely good.
That’s why he views the myth of Sisyphus in a surprisingly different light than is usually done. He raises the question: is Sisyphus-work really an infinite torment and fruitless work?
Albert Camus (1913-1960) grew up in Tipasa, a small village near Algiers. When the Second World War broke out, he was in Paris. He joined the resistance and became editor-in-chief of the banned magazine ‘Combat’.
The dramatic experience of the war carved deep into his soul. How can you live in a world that knows no justice? How can you move on without despairing?
When he returns to Algeria, it rains. He sees the traces of violence because of the war. There is a gloomy atmosphere. Then the sun breaks through the clouds and it dawns on him that the beauty of the landscape is still there, despite the war.
He realises that the atmosphere of the warm glow of the sun, the lively sea and the singing birds has still remained alive in his memory.
This experience is of great significance for his life. Thus he writes:
In the middle of winter, I finally understood that there was an invincible summer in me.
It is this memory of inner light that gives him the courage to continue and to which he returns in difficult moments.
The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall are Camus’ best-known works.
The plague, written in 1947, was reread and discussed by many during the corona time and a new edition was even published in 2020. In The Plague, doctor Bernard Rieux refuses to acquiesce to the plague epidemic, which brings death for many.
He is committed to fight the epidemic at the risk of his own life.
To my belief I have no affinity with heroism and holiness. What interests me is being human.
The book ends with his decision to write down his experiences ‘so that he would at least leave a memory of the injustice and violence that had been inflicted on them and so that he could easily pass on what can be learned from plagues, namely that there is more to admire than to despise in man’.
Last year, Bas Heijne, writer, translator and interviewer, brought Camus’s book
A Higher Love. Letters to a German Friend back into the spotlight. In these letters, Camus discusses that where power and lust for power appear, the need for resistance arises. In spite of having great aversion to causing pain and bloodshed, man is forced to take up the fight. In his view, you lose your dignity when you fight for power, but you retain your dignity if you have the courage, against your feelings, to fight for the higher values of human freedom and love.
Camus continued to see the vulnerability of every human being in the resistance.
He was attacked on that view. But he continued to propagate the value of a personal morality of friendship and humanity.
There always comes a moment,
he writes in his Diary,
when people stop fighting and destroying each other, when they are finally willing to love each other as they are. That is the kingdom of heaven.
Doesn’t this ‘moment’ have everything to do with the degree of consciousness in a person?
In myths we find images that mirror our unconscious. Myths can help to develop human consciousness. They can touch something essential and universal, which is recognised inwardly and characterises the path of life.
Myths are not fixed stories. It is said that myths are formed by every ear that hears them and by every mouth that tells them. They can develop over time.
In this way, Camus draws attention to an unexposed aspect of the well-known Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the mortal who rebelled against the gods, despised death and developed a great passion for life. For this he was given the heaviest punishment: he had to push a colossal boulder up a steep mountain, which once at the top rolls down again, and repeatedly confronts him with the assignment of pushing the boulder up again. A futile task.
The reason why aimless and hopeless work is also known as a Sisyphus task.
Camus thinks beyond the boulder that has to be pushed up and rolls down again.
He asks you to imagine Sisyphus as he calmly walks down the mountain, behind his stone.
It is on this way back, during this pause, that Sisyphus has my interest,
Camus writes.
This moment, a moment like a breath, which will come back as surely as his misery, this moment is the moment of consciousness.
Walking down, Sisyphus becomes aware of the absurdity of his situation.
Doesn’t the myth of Sisyphus reflect the feeling that you sometimes experience yourself, that what you do or how you live, suddenly grabs you as a pointless and aimless repetition? In the words of Camus ‘as something absurd’. You get up, have breakfast, work, eat, sleep and get up again. For what?
This feeling of alienation, of the absurd, says Camus, arises because you become aware of the endless repetition of life, that there is nothing new under the sun,
that people come and go, and you become aware of your own finitude.
To Camus, Sisyphus is the ultimate absurd hero.
‘Again and again Sisyphus exerts himself to lift the huge stone, to roll and push it up the slope. You see the distorted face, the cheek pressed against the stone, the action of a shoulder that catches the clay-covered mass, of a foot that holds the boulder in place, the outstretched arm with which he pushes it up again.’
The Sisyphus of Camus has been brought to awareness. He has the courage to face his situation in an honest way. He realises that he is stronger than the boulder. He achieves victory over matter, over every grain of the stone, over every glimmer that shines from it, because he accepts his task again and again in full consciousness. He does not flee his fate.
The Greek myth makes it clear, that man is not free to escape his fate. Camus adds that the conscious human being does have the freedom to shape his own fate and life. ‘Life,’ Camus concludes concisely, ‘is not: resignation.’ Doctor Rieux does not resign himself to the plague epidemic and Sisyphus also does not resign, by deliberately putting his shoulder under the boulder time and time again.
We must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man,
he writes. Camus gives the myth extra depth.
Sisyphus is said to have been cunning, therefor incurring the wrath of the gods.
It is said that he was a master of trickery and deception, that he was arrogant and outsmarted death. But Homer speaks of Sisyphus as the wisest and most thoughtful man on earth.
What drove Sisyphus to explore the boundaries of being human? Camus says that Sisyphus freely accepts the situation that he has become aware of. That’s great.
But why this contempt for death?
In present times we are discovering more and more that consciousness is also outside the human body. Hermes Trismegistos states in the Corpus Hermeticum that consciousness extends to infinity:
And man, in order to rise up in the heavens, does not have to leave the earth. So vast and grand is what spans his consciousness.
Did something in the consciousness of Sisyphus speak of immortal life anywhere?
The contemporary Sisyphus is the human being who is aware of the earth, of the natural world in which he lives, in which contradictions determine life, in which all life rises, falls and fades again. And it is man who at the same time recognises the voice of eternity. It is the human being who approaches the original one source of all life groping, because he experiences, because he knows that he also carries that inexhaustible source within himself. The inner voice of eternity gives him the awareness that in deepest essence everything is one.
As the stone rolls up, as it descends, during his life, the modern Sisyphus bestows comfort, friendship, and love on all those who still suffer the torment of meaningless labor and bear hopeless sorrow. He gives his attention, light and strength without expecting anything in return, just like Sisyphus puts his shoulder under the boulder again and again. Helping to fulfill the work of the heavenly light in the world gives every Sisyphus eternal joy.
Literature
Beeckman, Tinneke: Ken jezelf, Boom, 2024
Camus, Albert, De mythe van Sisyphus, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 1963
Camus, Albert, Een hogere liefde, brieven aan een Duitse vriend met een essay van Bas Heijne, Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2024
Camus, Albert, De pest, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2020
Camus, Albert, Dagboek, De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1969
