Every time Sisyphus reaches the summit, the stone rolls back down, forcing Sisyphus to begin the task again. In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus recounts the story of the mortal Sisyphus-condemned by the gods to roll a stone up a mountain for all eternity. As a recent Crimson column explains, Harvard students may be more likely to struggle with “certain basic issues of existence: mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.” For a potential answer to our existential woes, we should look to the writings of the absurdist philosopher Albert Camus. Crushed under the weight of demanding course loads and extracurricular activities, most Harvard students would admit that, at least once, they have questioned the meaning of their toil-or wondered whether their efforts are truly worth it all. At the center of all this existential introspection is Harvard’s overworked student body. Thank you for making this journey such a surprising, rewarding, and entertaining one, every single day.Wracked by recent debates on the decline of academic integrity and deficiencies in mental health services, Harvard is in a period of soul-searching. And I am grateful, every day, for the world we have created inside the Library–from the Library Staff and Aides and Custodians and you, our Beloved Patrons. We can control that, even if it is on the smallest of scales. We make our world through our actions and our interactions. But it is my round-about way of getting to this point:

I don’t know if this story resonated with you as much as it did me. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. As Camus notes, the moment you take control over the rock, and start pushing it again, you become the hero of your story. Sisyphus defies the gods by giving his own life meaning, making each step of his journey more important than the final goal. There is no tragedy in having to start again, as long as you start again. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear…But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. To own both our failures and our successes as little things that we can control in the midst of an uncontrollable world. So what is there to do? According to Camus, it is to take pride, joy, and purpose from the little things that you can do. Those who attempt to sit back and make order of it all are doomed to failure, because the world, in its misery and absurdity, will swallow you whole. It was random and chaotic, and made no inherent sense.

The world, Camus (see left) said, was insane.

For generations, artists, authors, and philosophers have portrayed Sisyphus as trapped in a mundane and pointless existence where the only escape is eventual, inevitable death….a portrait of despair with which I think we have all identified at one point or another.īut Camus re-thought Sisyphus’ story, and cast him not as an eternal victim for having to push that stone endlessly up the hill…but as a hero, because he never gave up trying. Every day, Sisyphus would attempt the nearly overwhelming task of pushing his boulder, only to have it roll back down the hill, hitting him on the way, and forcing him to start the process all over again. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra who was punished by the gods for his greed and craftiness (some stories have him outsmarting the gods who tried to punish him) by being forced to push an enormous boulder up a hill. And just when I thought I couldn’t go on reading, because I knew that feeling of claustrophobic apprehension, the hero of the book mentioned a quote by French author and philosopher Albert Camus: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. Suffice it for now to say that it’s a powerfully atmospheric book, transporting readers not only into the overwhelmingly vast Arctic, but also forcing them to share in the characters’ dread as illness and ice slowly choke the life from them and from their ship. The book I’m working through now is Stranded, by Bracken MacLeod, about which more later.

Imagine sisyphus happy