Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus)
I opened it looking for comfort, did not find it, and I am glad I did not. Camus never says there is meaning; having to push the rock again does not make pushing meaningless.
Camus begins the book with a single question: is life worth living?
For him this is the real philosophical question. How many dimensions the world has, how the mind works, all of that comes later.
And he does not ask it as a metaphor. He opens by discussing suicide directly.
The softening I expected never came
I opened this book looking for comfort and I did not find it. I am glad I did not.
Camus never says "actually, there is a meaning." He says there is none, and goes on.
This honesty did me good. Because most texts first admit the problem and then somehow take it back: actually there is a meaning here, actually it is a matter of perspective.
Camus does not take it back. The weight of the book comes from there.
Where the absurd stands
What Camus calls "the absurd" is not life itself. It is easy to miss this distinction, and when it is missed the book is misunderstood.
Humans look for meaning. The universe does not answer.
The absurd is the meeting of these two: the collision of the demand with the silence.
So the absurd does not stand in the world, it stands in the gap between. You cannot blame the human alone or the universe alone; it appears when the two come together.
This distinction matters because he looks for the solution there as well: instead of trying to close the gap, learning to stand in the gap.
Three options
Camus lists the paths open to someone who meets this gap.
Physical suicide. Removing the question. Camus rejects it: this does not solve the absurd, it only removes the person who asks.
Philosophical suicide. Taking refuge in a belief and closing the gap. He rejects this too, and here he gets harsh: to him this is an escape, and a dishonest one. This is why he criticizes Kierkegaard.
Revolt. Accepting meaninglessness and still going on living.
The path Camus chooses is the third, and the revolt here is not rage. It is to keep asking the question while knowing the answer will not come.
The walk down
In the myth Sisyphus is punished by having to push a rock to the top of a hill. Each time the rock rolls back down and he starts again. Forever.
The moment Camus is interested in is the time spent walking down after he has seen the rock roll.
The moment Sisyphus knows his situation. The moment he knows he has no hope, that tomorrow he will do the same thing.
Reading this part I thought about the moments when the systems I had built collapsed.
A system that had worked for months breaks and has to be rebuilt from scratch. Until then I read that as failure: so I cannot do it, so something is wrong with me.
What Camus does is take that moment out of being a defeat. Having to push the rock again does not make pushing meaningless.
The famous last sentence
He says we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
This sentence is often misunderstood and goes around as a declaration of optimism. It is not.
What he says is narrower: if you cannot change the outcome, how you look at it is still yours.
Camus does not beautify the situation. He does not say the rock gets lighter or the hill gets lower. He points to the only choice left inside the situation, and that choice is small.
He stands somewhere completely different from the advice to "think positive," and it matters to see the difference. One asks you to change reality, the other shows what is left once you have accepted reality.
Don Juan, the actor, the conqueror
There is a part of the book that is rarely discussed: Camus gives examples of "absurd men."
Don Juan, who keeps loving while knowing no love lasts. The actor, who is someone else every night and knows none of them is himself. The conqueror, who fights knowing everything he wins is temporary.
What they share: they have given up hope for the outcome but not given up the action.
This part seemed to me the weakest of the book. The examples are too romantic and too male; here Camus slides from philosophy into literature.
The parts I skipped
In the middle there are sections on the history of philosophy: discussions of Kierkegaard, Husserl, Shestov, Jaspers.
To be honest, I went through some of them quickly and lost nothing. The spine of the book is in the first and last chapters.
How I read it
A hundred and fifty pages, but you do not read it in one sitting.
It is written as an essay and the chapters end within themselves. I read it in pieces and that was never a problem; it even felt like the way it is meant to be read.
Camus's language is literary. He tries to persuade more than to build an argument, and this sometimes bothers readers who expect a philosophy text. It did not bother me.
It was written in 1942, in occupied France. Camus received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960.