Everyone has a Rock
I have been told that I was a bit of a smart ass as a
child. Too clever for my own good, thought about stuff too much, a bit of a
weirdo, off; you know the kid. I asked questions that adults didn’t like. When
I was 9, I remember asking several people “What is the meaning of life?” I
don’t remember what prompted this type of inquiry, but I remember the utter
failure in the responses I received. Some would just give me the “weird kid”
eye and halfheartedly remark about me being a smart ass. Others would give me a
traditional Judeo-Christian response; this answer seemed good natured and
right, but I had known that Santa wasn’t real since four and it always smelled
a bit like a fairy tale. Now my religious inadequacies aside no answer even
came close to satisfying.
My sister is four years older than me and we would always
get into petty arguments over who knew more. She was ahead in school and so I
had to rely on crafty trick questions to win such arguments. One such question
was:
“Well, what is the meaning of life then?”
Every time this would stammer her, with responses like
“No one can answer that,” or “to do Good and go to heaven.”
And I would always smirk and reply: “Trick question;
there is no meaning.”
What started as a curiosity and clever answer to a hard
question, has stuck with me for fifteen years, at times driving me to sickness
and psychosis. I am an avid reader of
those who struggle with this question. Religious texts, existentialist
literature, atheist ideologies and philosophy, I gobble them up, hoping for a better
answer.
There is one book in particular that has helped (this
may not be the best verb for how it has affected me) me immensely in my life. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus.
I am not going to say that I recommend this book to the
casual reader. It is neither fun to read nor easy. The primary base of the text
addresses the issue of the absurd and its implications and reads (albeit more
eloquently) as a philosophy text. Famously the text begins with the challenge
that:
“There is but one truly serious philosophical
problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living
amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
This hooked me. Camus struggles with the idea of the
absurd in its relation to suicide. The absurd as he understands it is “the
actor divorced from his setting.” In essence he concludes that man/woman’s
rationality and reason can never fully make sense of the random chaos of the universe.
There are only two options left after such an observation:
A)
Take a
leap of faith- whether it is religious or philosophical. That is to say come to
a conclusion that directly contradicts your reason.
B)
Conclude
that life is meaningless.
Like me,
Camus has a fundamental handicap in the faith department. For him, faith goes
against rationality and is akin to lying to oneself (at least for him, he makes
no claim to others). There is a painful honesty in this, and leads him to
confront the only other conclusion available- meaninglessness.
Much of
Camus philosophy is an embittered battle against the nihilism he struggles
with. Camus has to face his original question, if there is no point, why not
off yourself? He rejects this notion and in doing so attempts to refute
nihilism. He asserts that, truly the only way to live is to stare the absurd in
the face. To never let the inherent contradiction of the human condition escape
your attention. Suicide is much like a leap of faith; it removes the question
instead of answering it. By facing the absurd one can live life with the
fullest freedom and laugh when the entire world weeps. He maintains that this
is a constant struggle and that it should be embraced as such.
So despite
the meaninglessness of life, we raise our middle fingers to the universe and
that we live with such purpose, we live our lives so hard, we live in constant contradiction
to the world, that we are truly free.
Alright I
know I am boring you with philosophy again. So let’s get to the good part. Camus
embeds a story among all his philosophy to best convey its purpose: The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is ancient
Greek hero considered the wisest of mortals who escapes death and scorns the
gods. His mortality catches up with him and he is condemned to the terrible
fate of pointless labor for eternity.
“He is, as much through his passions as through
his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for
life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted
toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the
passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld.
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth,
one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone,
to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face
screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the
clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched,
the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his
long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is
achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward
that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He
goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that
Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself!
I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the
torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space
which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. 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.”
For me,
this says much. Life is often hard and there is no standard measurement for
acceptable misery. What this truly means to me is that the world is what I make
of it and that even if my experience contains suffering, I can shape my
reaction and indeed my outlook on it. You can be strengthened by your
circumstance. Indeed the most beautiful people are often the most scarred
(insert cliché alarm).
When I get
really sick with UC, I have to read The
Myth of Sisyphus. Because when throwing up blood and rolling around with the
burning hot knife of pancreatic acid cramps, I can decide that I am stronger
than my rock. It has facilitated my finding of creativity, determination and
compassion while bedridden for months at a time. It has helped me to make fuel
from shit, to drive me into an impassioned frenzy rather than a stagnant pit.
And it has convinced me more than once that giving up is horseshit. So….
“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."
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