NOTHING IS MORE ETERNAL

Me: So is it bad?

Sisyphus: I’ve seen worse.

Me: Really?

Sisyphus: I’m way past all that.

For anyone playing with death the way Sisyphus did, that death will not come as a relief. There is no end to Sisyphus’ torment of rolling a gigantic stone up a mountain, pushing and heaving with no end in sight; barely has the stone reached the top, it becomes impossible to hold and rolls all the way back down to the bottom. And the toil begins all over again. Camus believed that Sisyphus stood for the human being in the midst of an absurd existence, performing acts in order to generate some kind of sense. Sisyphus is in good shape. He has to be a monstrously strong man. And each trip up the mountain will provide him with even more strength, both physically and mentally, to be one for all: if his plight goes on forever, then all other life continues. A worker against finiteness, a hero, the type who holds doors open for us.

AR

Image: Sisyphus punished. In the background Hercules with his lion skin. Monumental southern Italian Greek vase (330 BCE) from Canossa in Apulia, Italy. Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich, Germany