Albert Camus reinterprets the Sisyphus myth to find the tragic heroism in all of us
“If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” - Albert Camus
The alarmingly high number of people suffering from depression and anxiety can be a sign of how much our life may seem meaningless or, according the philosopher Alber Camus, absurd. If life looks like that, it’s important to read what he has to say, thoughts coming straight from the Cold War days.
A personality hard to categorize due to his ideas and personal life, Albert Camus maintain his importance to the present days. In his essay “The myth of Sisyphus” published in 1941, he delves into the classic to shed light upon the absurd and chaotic world surrounding him.
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
With Sisyphus being his “absurd hero” due to his love for life, a tragedy shared by all of us, he says:
“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.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
Camus not only defines his concept of heroism, but also the kind of happiness possible in an absurd world: the consciousness and the rebellion against the lack of hope. An argument he develops by creating a parallel with the story of Oedipus:
“Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same time, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism."
If even Sisyphus can be happy and this would be greatest rebellion against the divine punishment. However, Camus do not talk about possibility. To him, it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus being happy:
“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.”
Camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957 and became part of the great group of writers like José Saramago and William Faulkner that not only marked their time but also keep their relevance. Read also the idea Saramago proposed in his Nobel speech and the interview given by Faulkner at the University of Virginia.
On libraries by Oliver Sacks
When I was a child, my favorite room at home was the library, a large oak-paneled room with all four walls covered by bookcases—and a solid table for writing and studying in the middle. It was here that my father had his special library, as a Hebrew scholar; here too were all of Ibsen’s plays—my parents had originally met in a medical students’ Ibsen society; here, on a single shelf, were the young poets of my father’s generation, many killed in the Great War; and here, on the lower shelves so I could easily reach them, were the adventure and history books belonging to my three older brothers. It was here that I found The Jungle Book; I identified deeply with Mowgli, and used his adventures as a taking-off point for my own fantasies.
My mother had her favorite books in a separate bookcase in the lounge—Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray, Bernard Shaw’s plays in pale green bindings, as well as an entire set of Kipling bound in soft morocco. There was a beautiful three-volume set of Shakespeare’s works, a gilt-edged Milton, and other books, mostly poetry, that my mother had got as school prizes.
Medical books were kept in a special locked cabinet in my parents’ surgery (but the key was in the door, so it was easy to unlock).
The oak-paneled library was the quietest and most beautiful room in the house, to my eyes, and it vied with my little lab as my favorite place to be. I would curl up in a chair and become so absorbed in what I was reading that all sense of time would be lost. Whenever I was late for lunch or dinner I could be found, completely absorbed by a book, in the library. I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.
But the Ur-library, for me, was the Willesden Public Library, our own local public library. Here I spent many of the happiest hours of my growing-up years—our house was a five-minute walk from the library—and it was there I received my real education.
On the whole, I disliked school, sitting in class, receiving instruction; information seemed to go in one ear and out by the other. I could not be passive—I had to be active, learn for myself, learn what I wanted, and in the way which suited me best. I was not a good pupil, but I was a good learner, and in Willesden Library—and all the libraries that came later—I roamed the shelves and stacks, had the freedom to select whatever I wanted, to follow paths which fascinated me, to become myself. At the library I felt free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books; free to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own.
As I got older, my reading was increasingly biased towards the sciences, especially astronomy and chemistry. St. Paul’s School, where I went when I was twelve, had an excellent general library, the Walker Library, which was particularly heavy in history and politics—but it could not provide all of the science and especially chemistry books I now hungered for. But with a special testimonial from one of the school masters, I was able to get a ticket to the library of the Science Museum, and there I devoured the many volumes of Mellor’s Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry and the even-longer Gmelin’s Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry.
When I went to university, I had access to Oxford’s two great university libraries, the Radcliffe Science Library and the Bodleian, a wonderful general library that could trace itself back to 1602. It was in the Bodleian that I stumbled upon the now-obscure and forgotten works of Theodore Hook, a man greatly admired in the early nineteenth century for his wit and his genius for theatrical and musical improvisation (he was said to have composed more than five hundred operas on the spot). I became so fascinated by Hook that I decided to write a sort of biography or “case-history” of him. No other library—apart from the British Museum Library—could have provided the materials I needed, and the tranquil atmosphere of the Bodleian was a perfect one in which to write.
But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, were the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me—I particularly adored Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551), richly illustrated with Dürer’s drawing of a rhinoceros and Agassiz’s four-volume work on fossil fishes. It was there, too, that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions, and it was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions. While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—John-son, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.
I first came to New York City in 1965, and at that time I had a horrid, pokey little apartment in which there were almost no surfaces to read or write on. I was just able, holding an elbow awkwardly aloft, to write some of Migraine on the top of the refrigerator. I longed for spaciousness. Fortunately, the library at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I worked, had this in abundance. I would sit at a large table to read or write for a while, and then wander around the shelves and stacks. I never knew what my eyes might alight upon, but I would sometimes discover unexpected treasures, lucky finds, and bring these back to my seat.
Though the library was quiet, whispered conversations might start in the stacks—two of you, perhaps, were searching for the same old book, the same bound volumes of Brain from 1890—and conversations could lead to friendships. All of us in the library were reading our own books, absorbed in our own worlds, and yet there was a sense of community, even intimacy. The physicality of books—along with their places and their neighbors on the bookshelves—was part of this camaraderie: handling books, sharing them, passing them between us, even seeing the names of previous readers and the dates they took books out.
But a shift was occurring by the 1990s. I would continue to visit the library frequently, sitting at a table with a mountain of books in front of me, but students increasingly ignored the bookshelves, accessing what they needed with their computers. Few of them went to the shelves anymore. The books, so far as they were concerned, were unnecessary. And since the majority of users were no longer using the books themselves, the college decided, ultimately, to dispose of them.
I had no idea that this was happening—not only in the AECOM library but in college and public libraries all over the country. I was horrified when I visited the library a couple of months ago and found the shelves, once overflowing, sparsely occupied. Over the last few years, most of the books, it seems, have been thrown out, with remarkably little objection from anyone. I felt that a murder, a crime had been committed—the destruction of centuries of knowledge. Seeing my distress, a librarian reassured me that everything “of worth” had been digitized. But I do not use a computer, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of books, even bound periodicals, for there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft. I thought of how the library once cherished “old” books, had a special room for old and rare books; and how in 1967, rummaging through the stacks, I had found an 1873 book, Edward Liveing’s Megrim, which inspired me to write my own first book.
The ultimate objective of the polarization is the rupture. About our stolen country.
“Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses.”
We’re divided. It’s impossible to pass a day without dealing with at least some kind of polarization. A conversation that for sheer lack of touch ends up in a critical subject in which you (and the other) will discover if the civilized person talking to you is a disgusting ignorant or a illuminated friend. The poles exist to include and to divide, left, right, liberals, socialists, feminists, machos, activists, homofobics, conservatives. In everybody’s mind there’s the idealized human being and also it’s imperfect counterpart, that person who agrees with evertyhing you think or the person who draws anger and resentment due to their foolishness, defending what can only be unthinkable.
This judgement by oposition, rushing to judge people based only in how they get close to our ideas is a childish and improductive way of recognize ourselves as part of certain groups and deny other people’s approaches. The pettiness lies in the fact that this behavior reinforces the idea of non communicant groups, penalize those who are open to change their minds and, if we consider the collective space, it’s also clear that the negotiations are out of question. The lack of interaction and flux of ideas suffocate the collective imaginary, limitating diversity and preventing alterations due to an ambient where everybody hold desperately to partidary positions that arise more from a midiatic and electoral game than from a real interest for the complexity involving bigger issues.
In the dicotomy terrain the only things thriving in all their charm and inconsequence are the leaderships, gathering the constant tension to idealize and therefore, to obscure the real problems and it’s nuances to create a well rounded story about good guys and bad guys where, be they a nazi right or a stalinist left, the outcome is a blind course of action in face of what’s, almost always a scarecrow. This way of acting becomes, due to a complete avoidance of the intelectual debate, sometimes mistaken by shallow screaming and Facebook posts (or even lower, columns of the big media), a script defining both the position and the level of engagement of it’s followers.
Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses. Without space for debate and negotiation the discourses are always the most radicalized and simplistic, common place and obvious, even if it’s disastrous, specially for those who have no space in the decision making proccess. However, the intensification of this scenario comes from a mixture of interests, prejudices and fears that were instaled over the years and now broke loose over our society still recovering from a sordid amputation.
The polarization can only be disputed in the political space since the other channels are closed, reinforcing the power of the official institutions making it easier to dominate both sides by those who can dominate the most powerful positions inside the pre-established structure. It was interesting to see these very institutions being used to disarm the entire society and then being responsible for their own social political subversion, a metamorphosis that goes way beyond the usual in moments of transition.
What happened was a profound rupture through the intentional and organized dismembering of the social, political and economical model that guided the country in the last years. A model developed over years of democratic decisions with all the agregated influences that arised from the power dinamics of the country, always dependent of certain respect to the institutions – even with all the expected troubles – not only as the law guided, but also as it existed on the nation’s imaginary and according to the project of nation that, for good or evil, was kept legitimate.
As the dichotomy allows the articulation of the assailants it becomes a duty to think the scenario as a whole in order to hold back this general structure that’s failing brazilians. Even a victory by strong opposition, as it was for them, wouldn’t not mean a return anymore, nothing will erase from our history, both in short and in the long term, this ideological shock. Fighting for a return if not conservatism is at least a dangerous longing that can leave us unable to act when action is needed the most.
The only option is to resist, to call out the lack of legimity and demand reparations for the damage being done to Brazil. However, we must have in mind that a return is impossible. It´s urgent the rise of a new objective, that also won’t come rescued from our past as a mask to the present. Our past struggles must stay there as history for now we have to organize a new action plan. Fighting is essential but we have to think, to elaborate not only the next steps but also the future goals and to do this we must not forget what was taken from us. What we lost wasn’t a project of nation, we lost the very own hability to project and no fight will be enough if we keep asking for the past to come back, because it will not come, they made it impossible. What’s to come is uncertain, a sad uncertainty for all of us who had any optimism with Brazil prior the coup. As consolation there’s only the possibility, because our uncertainty is also theirs.
Human Duties: Saramago's idea for a better world
“With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties.” - Saramago
Since the early days in school we learn: the “citizen” has rights and duties that, people say, are equal to everyone. However, when we study a bit more we discover a gradient that ranges from citizens full of duties and few rights to those that can do anything without being held responsible. A situation better summarized by the portuguese writer José Saramago:
"In this half-century, obviously governments have not morally done for human rights all that they should. The injustices multiply, the inequalities get worse, the ignorance grows, the misery expands." - Saramago
This speech, pronounced during the event in which he was laureated by the Nobel Prize in Literature, opened the dinner at December 10th in 1998, exactly fifty years after the signature of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Having so much attention during these moments, José Saramago seized the opportunity to proppose a counterpart to this essential document, he wanted the Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities.
Rough for the entrance of a gala event, he made clear that he didn't believed in social improvements coming from the governments due to many reasons, but mainly because the true rulers are the bigcompanies. And that if we wanted something, it would have to be achieved through the people, a fight in which the demands should emanate from a desire to assume the responsibilities that come with our rights.
“Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.” -José Saramago
Saramago died in 2010 without seeing this project finished. But in June 2015 the foundation that carries his name, having the writer and translator Pillar del Río as president, gathered intelectualsand specialists from diferent areas to discuss the creation of the document proposed by the writer. The discussion aims to find the first directions for the creation of the document, even though the project still have to receive many contributions before reaching it's final formulaton:
“We need to change focus and perspectives, to breack with clichês in order to imagine a different world, só we can dare to think of a new utopia. To imagine a world where hunger, ignorance and the preventable deaths find no place, where there's no segregation due to race, religion, gender or economic reasons.” - José Narro Robles, UNAM's Dean.
At this first moment, Pillar del Río occupy a crucial position in the event and opens the debate without concerns with specificity while the objective remains clear. As a specialist in the works of the writer and also due to her personal life as his wife, she's the right person to point Saramago´s intentions, but knowing very well that if it grows it will be much bigger than the ambitions of only one person.
“We'll propose, diffuse and offer our means and possibilities and work as if everything depended on us, but being very conscious that it doesn't.” - Pillar del Río, president of the José Saramago Foundation.
The support or the critic about this attempt still depends on how this documents will be developed and it's content, for now we can only think and search answers to not so simple questions. To qustion the duties of every person, even their existence, can be a starting point to something that can become huge in the coming decades. When dealing with these complicated tasks it's important to remember the defense that Alain de Botton made about the professionals from the humanities and the solutions that can come from this field.