This week, due to our in-class writing exercise on Thursday, you only need to complete one blog entry. With that being said, if you complete more than one--you will obtain extra credit.
First question of the week, how do you interpret, decipher, and understand Camus' essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus." How does this essay by Camus correlate to the ideas present within "Notes from Underground" and/or your own personal experiences? Is Sisyphus' rock comparable to the walls our narrator runs into?
OR for those of you feeling rested and a little bold...
Discuss and explain the following quote:
"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."
"I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." --Martin Luther King Jr.
Let's remember and celebrate Dr. King today, but more importantly, let us keep his words in our hearts everyday.
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Myth of Sisyphus
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This was meant to answer number two, but it might fit better into number one. But I don't think that really matters.
I feel like this quote, indeed the whole story, fits very well into what I was talking about in my last blog entry about how our humanity is defined by the "absurd" goals we pursue, in the journeys that never end. While Sisyphus' struggle clearly borders on the height of irrationality, aren't we all in some measure, like Sisyphus with his stone? Don't we all find ourselves questioning, at some point, the mindlessness of life? How little we can accomplish as a single human? Shakespeare's tragic figure Macbeth famously says, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
We have been talking a lot in class about Siddhartha, and about how one of the four truths in Buddhism is that "life is suffering." Some have agreed with this notion, but many have disagreed. Personally, I believe in this truth - we just have to change our notion in what exactly suffering means. In Latin, the verb "to suffer" is labor, which also means "to work." I have always found it interesting the two distinct meanings that this word takes. Yet are they so different? Perhaps not: at least, I think this is the point of Sisyphus. If we give in to the "conscious inertia" of the Underground, it is true that we will not feel pain. But we will know nothing of joy either. Camus writes, "There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."
The core theme of many of the works from literature of the ancient Western World, like Virgil's Aeneid, Sophocles' Oedipus, and Homer's Odyssey, is that of free will versus Fate. Do the gods control the fate of the tragic hero? Or does the hero himself? In the myth of Sisyphus and in all of these epics, it would seem at first to be the former. Yet although the gods have relegated Sisyphus to this monotonous labor, it is him, in "the hour of consciousness" that controls his fate by returning back down that mountain. He chooses himself to continue, "he is superior to his fate."
Why, why, why does Sisyphus never give in? Because by rising above his fate, he is proving his humanity, his "passion for life". That is the one thing that no punishment from any god or mortal can ever take away from him. From this comes "his silent joy." Indeed, I too imagine Sisyphus happy.
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