Word: sisyphus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Madness of Excess. Operating from the underlying premise that God does not exist, Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) that the certainty of death made life itself a ridiculous charade, and therefore "absurd." He likened man's lot to the somber task of the Greek mythic hero Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down again, to the end of time. But from this recognition Camus drew his own peculiar sustenance: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged," i.e., knowledge...
That is the harrowing dilemma that Camus sketched in essay form in The Myth of Sisyphus (TIME, Oct. 3, 1955) -the vision of a man in despair who can believe in damnation but not salvation. Yet in this novel there are clues of something else to come. The hero's name, Jean-Baptiste, is intriguing as a wordplay on John the Baptist, the herald of Christ's coming. The Fall is too obviously the novel of a man in mid-quest to be Camus' last word. Perhaps both book and author are best described by the late...
...review of The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus states: "The garden which Voltaire advised the French to cultivate (instead of listening to crazy Germanic philosophers) has turned out to be a stony little half-acre. Furthermore, the horticulture is hampered all the time by the heavy tread of Germanic philosophers among the petits pois." . . . The philosophic garden of Voltaire sprouted such "petits pois" as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the U.S. Constitution. These intellectual crops still come in handy...
When Novelist Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger) wrote his essay on The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940 (now fully published in the U.S. for the first time), the agony of Western civilization and the German occupation of France seemed to make deadly plain what such Nordic philosophers as Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Jaspers had argued: that man's reason cannot give reason to man's life. In this extremity, some intellectuals got religion; others followed Jean-Paul Sartre into leftwing, atheistic existentialism. Camus, however, tries to escape both from the existentialists ("Negation is their God") and from...
...questions up the fashionable modern Parnassus-inhabited by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gide, and all manner of existentialists. In the end, a little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily on the steps...