Le Mythe de Sisyphe

Chapter 1. “An Absurd Reasoning” by Albert Camus

[Suicide and the Meaning of Life]

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide.
To judge whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
The rest—whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterwards. These are games; one must answer first.
And, if it is true, as Nietzsche claims,
that a philosopher should preach by example in order to command respect, one begins to understand the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are truths the heart can feel, yet they must be examined in depth to become clear to the mind.
If I ask myself how to judge that a particular question is more pressing than another, I reply that it is by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who was holding a scientific truth of some importance, abjured it with
the greatest ease as soon as it put his life in danger. To some extent, he did the right thing. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth turns around the sun or vice versa does not fundamentally matter.
To say it all, the question is futile. On the other hand, I see many people die because they consider that life is not worth being lived.
I see others paradoxically being shot dead for the ideas and illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). Thus I judge that the meaning of life is the most pressing of all questions.



[Suicide: Physical and Emotional Aspect]

Suicide has never been dealt with but
as a social phenomenon.
On the contrary, the matter we are dealing with, at the outset, is that of the relationship of individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared in the silence of the heart, as is a great work. The man
himself knows nothing of it. One evening, he pulls the trigger or he hurls himself into living. Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told one day that he had lost his daughter five years earlier, that he had changed a lot since then, and that such experience “had sapped” him.
One cannot wish for a more exact word. To begin to think is to begin to be sapped.
Society has little to do with those beginnings.
The worm is in man’s heart. It is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this life-or-death-game that leads a man from facing existence with lucidity to escaping it.
There are many reasons for a suicide, and the most obvious generally are not the most decisive.
Suicide is rarely (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) committed out of reflection. What triggers the crisis
is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “private sorrows” or “incurable illness.”
These explanations are plausible, still one should know whether a friend of the desperate man had not
the very same day talked to him with indifference.
That man is the guilty one. For it may be all it takes to well up a lump of bitterness and weariness still in suspension. However, if it is hard to determine exactly the moment and the subtle process when the mind is opting for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and like in a melodrama, to kill oneself is to confess. It is for a man to confess that life is too much and he does not understand it. Let’s not look too closely at such analogies, however, but rather return to common
speech. To kill oneself is merely to confess that it “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. We continue to make the gestures that existence commands for many reasons, the first of which is habit. To die voluntarily supposes that one has recognized,
even instinctively, the ludicrous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the pointlessness of suffering.



Not long after comes a feeling of strangeness: perceiving that the world is “thick,” sensing to what point a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, how intensely nature or a landscape can negate us.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky,
the outline of these trees, at this very moment, all lose the illusory meaning with which we used to cloth them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up again through millennia. For a moment, we no longer understand the world because for centuries we understood only the images and the designs we were presumably placing in it;
henceforth, it has become too much for us to make use of that artifice. The world evades us since it becomes itself again. That scenery masked by habit returns to what it really is.
It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face
of a woman, we see a stranger for the one we had loved months and years ago, perhaps a time will come when we even desire what makes us suddenly so lonely. However, the time has not yet come.
Just one thing: that thickness and that strangeness of the world, all
that is the absurd.



The Myth of Sisyphus

In the last chapter, Camus outlines the legend of Sisyphus who defied the gods and put Death in chains so that no human needed to die. When Death was eventually liberated and it came time for Sisyphus himself to die, he concocted a deceit which let him escape from the underworld. Finally captured, the gods decided on his punishment: for all eternity, he would have to push a rock up a mountain; on the top, the rock rolls down again and Sisyphus has to start over. Camus sees Sisyphus as the absurd hero who lives life to the fullest, hates death and is condemned to a meaningless task.
Camus presents Sisyphus's ceaseless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices. "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."
Camus is interested in Sisyphus' thoughts when marching down the mountain, to start anew. This is the truly tragic moment, when the hero becomes conscious of his wretched condition. He does not have hope, but "[t]here is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Acknowledging the truth will conquer it; Sisyphus, just like the absurd man, keeps pushing. Camus claims that when Sisyphus acknowledges the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, he is freed to realize the absurdity of his situation and to reach a state of contented acceptance. With a nod to the similarly cursed Greek hero Oedipus, Camus concludes that "all is well," indeed, that "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

alfred knopf



Iniciei mil vezes o diálogo. Não há jeito.
Tenho me fatigado tanto todos os dias vestindo, despindo e arrastando amor infância, sóis e sombras.

hilda hilst



(...) Antes, eu ia e voltava da elevação no sol abrasador depois eu só conseguia sair daqui no sol abrasador e voltar na chuva e, depois ainda só nas estrelas e na lua. Agora são necessárias muitas chuvas, muitas estrelas, muitas luas e muitos sóis para ir e voltar. E isso é o tempo, muito mais tarde descobri que isso era o tempo. Fico aqui o dia inteiro, não há ninguém, não há nada. Fico aqui na gruta o dia inteiro, sem saber mais quando é sol abrasador, quando é chuva ou lua e estrelas, eu não sei mais. (...)

caio fernando abreu