Word: sisyphus
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Nowadays they talk about this guy named Sisyphus whose business it was to roll rocks up a hill. Sounds about as exciting as a weekend party at South House, huh? Well there's more. Every time he got the rock to the top of the hill it would roll back down and he'd have to start all over again...
...Sisyphus isn't around anymore, but there's another guy pushing rocks up a hill. His name is Ed Ajootian and the symbol of his frustration is a 35-pound metal weight...
...wrestled with depression. Cures are various, and likely to be temporary: a cold shower, a new hat, pills, a chat with a doctor or a friend, or simply repeating to oneself that "tomorrow is another day." Many people push a burden of inexplicable sadrtess through half a lifetime like Sisyphus with his famous stone, and try to believe that they are happy just the same. But when Author Percy Knauth fell into a depression, none of these things worked...
...fact that Willy disbelieves his own dreams does not prevent him from suspending that disbelief at the slightest provocation. It is this absurdly myopic vision of ours which keeps us from going quite mad--for how can one believe that Sisyphus would ever again put his shoulder to the rock were the total picture clear to him. No, he puts his shoulder to the rock always in the belief that this time he shall reach the top. And that vision of the top, at a distance from him measurable in finite hours of labor is the only real, compelling vision...
...have my applause for the TIME Essay, "The Delicate Subject of Inequality" [April 15]. I now know where America's much lamented heroes have gone. They have been shamed into mediocrity and a drab conformity by those embarrassed by excellence: the liberals who roll that stone of Sisyphus known as equality. In their search for a standard of equality, these new egalitarians never dare to look up. They seek the lowest common denominator and establish it as the norm so that no one, however squalid or vulgar, need be left out of the American Dream...