Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life. A space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living! This week begins another exploration of existential philosophy. Our book for the month of August is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist, How to Be Yourself, How to Think, and Being in the World, and Condemned to Be Free, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored a broad range of issues from meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence. Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism include: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Who is Albert Camus?
Albert Camus (1913—1960) was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs—at the weather bureau, an automobile-accessory firm, a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as a career. His books include The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and The Rebel. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures of the Western world.
The Myth of Sisyphus
The fundamental subject of “The Myth of Sisyphus” is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning. Camus writes, “Although ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. 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.
— Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus
The work’s title is inspired by Greek mythology, Camus makes the connection between life as an eternal beginning obedient to the absurd and Sisyphus, a hero of Greek mythology. Unlike the Sisyphus usually presented in mythology, Camus considers that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". Sisyphus finds happiness in the accomplishment of the task he undertakes.
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