Albert Camus “The Myth Of Sisyphus”
Biography of Camus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to cealessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain,
whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wist and most prudent of mortals. According to
another tradition, however, he was dispod to practice the profession of highwayman. I e no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accud of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their crets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell 10
about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts1 he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the
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underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto2 could not endure the sight of his derted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death
from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square.3 Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chasti his wife. But when he had en again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the a, he no longer wanted 20
to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many
years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling a, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and ized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.英文名翻译
o1You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd4 hero. 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
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them. As for this myth, one es merely the whole effort of a body straining to rai the huge
1 Zeus ud thunderbolts as his main weapon of destruction.
2 Pluto is the Roman name for the god of the Underworld. Greeks called him Hades.
3 Greeks believed that people who bodies were not given proper funeral rites would become ghosts condemned
to roam this world rather than find rest.
4 Absurdism: efforts to find meaning or a rational explanation of life is impossible becau there is no meaning. The
only choices are then suicide or hope (delude lf to ignore meaningless existence).
stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one es 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 curity of two earth-clotted hands.
At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the
purpo 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 pau, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so clo tomasffect
stones is already stone itlf! I e that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step 40
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 tho
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.
If this myth is tragic, that is becau its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The
lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate 50bugreport是什么
that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the
beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy aris in man's heart: this is the rock's
victory, this is the rock itlf. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. The are our nights of Gethmane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus5 at the outt obey长沙化妆培训学校
s fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl.6 Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my
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advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
5 The Delphic Oracle foretold that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. Not knowing he was
adopted, Oedipus leaves his home and ends up in Thebes where he marries the newly widowed queen, Jocasta.
Years later, Thebes is curd with a plague by Apollo. Oedipus asks the Delphic Oracle why, and it responds that the city allowed the murder of its king to go unpunished and that until this person is brought to justice, the city will continue to suffer. Oedipus begins investigating, but he ignores all the
clues along the way that point to him as the murderer. Eventually, he learns that the old man he killed on his way to Thebes was King Laius, his real father, and that Jocasta is his real mother. Jocasta commits suicide when she learns of this, and Oedipus puts out his own eyes and is exiled from Thebes, forever marked as the most unfortunate man alive.
6 His daughter
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.无个性战队
"What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inparable. It would be a mistake to say that
happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited univer of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a
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preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be ttled among men.
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All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewi, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the univer
suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth ri up.
Unconscious, cret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary rever and
price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is esntial to know the night. The
absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and
despicable. For the rest, he knows himlf to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment 80
when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight
pivoting he contemplates that ries of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon aled by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to e who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
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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 rais rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This univer henceforth without a master ems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itlf forms a world. The struggle itlf toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
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happy.
