The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I,” he says, "am unhappy because I am obliged to assert my freedom."

All existen ce for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.

"Art and nothing but art," said Nietzsche; "we have art in order not to die of the truth."

"What matters," said Nietzsche, "is not eternal life but eternal vivacity." All drama is, in fact, in this choice.

That is called losing oneself to find oneself.

What mnore ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simnply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?

There, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of which is the total gift and forgetfulness of self.

But men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. And all hasten to say: “He was a weakling, an idealist or a saint." One has to disparage the greatness that insults.

But the point is to live.

Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.

But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.

The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.

I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion.

18:34 "If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can fll underlay all things, what would life be but despair?"

Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them. It deserves attention.

In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together.

How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of these minds! How can one fail to see that they take their stand around a privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place?I want everything to be explained to mne or nothing.

Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.

The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third therne of this essay, is hope.

Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.