Name: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
ISBN: 9781535208130

Albert Camus

One of the most influential works of this century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

maia

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. 

Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third therne of this essay, is hope.

Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.

How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of these minds! How can one fail to see that they take their stand around a privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place?I want everything to be explained to mne or nothing.

In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. 

Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them. It deserves attention.

18:34 "If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can fll underlay all things, what would life be but despair?" 

I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. 

The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.

But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given. 

Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.

But men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. And all hasten to say: “He was a weakling, an idealist or a saint." One has to disparage the greatness that insults.

There, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of which is the total gift and forgetfulness of self. 

What mnore ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simnply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?

That is called losing oneself to find oneself.

"What matters," said Nietzsche, "is not eternal life but eternal vivacity." All drama is, in fact, in this choice.

"Art and nothing but art," said Nietzsche; "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

All existen ce for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.

Kendall McClain

and other essays

The Myth of Sisyphus

Diana Platgalve

Beautiful attempt to answer a fundamental question of “is life worth living?”Camus is inviting us to accept our absurd condition because facing the Absurd is what allows us to live to our fullest. Even if life is meaningless it does not require suicide, it requires revolt. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.

Suzie

M. G. Paulinus

One of the most influential works of this century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.