Rock On

Post   : Rock On
URL    : http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/05/06/rock-on/
Posted : May 6, 2013 at 1:20 pm

| Elsewhere I have brought out the fact that human will had no other purpose than to maintain awareness.
| But that could not do without discipline.  Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is
| the most effective.  It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity:  the dogged revolt
| against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile.  It calls for a daily effort,
| self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength.  It constitutes
| an ''ascesis''.  All that “for nothing”, in order to repeat and mark time.  But perhaps the
| great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and
| the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer
| to his naked reality.  (p. 115)
|
| All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal.  Outside of that single fatality of death,
| everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.  A world remains of which man is the sole master.  What
| bound him was the illusion of another world.  The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory,
| flowers in images.  It frolics — in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human
| suffering and, like it, inexhaustible.  Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial
| face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.  (pp. 117–118)
|
| I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain!  One always finds one's burden again.
| But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.
| He too concludes that all is well.  This universe henceforth without a master
| seems to him neither sterile nor futile.  Each atom of that stone, each
| mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.
| The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
| One must imagine Sisyphus happy.  (p. 123)

Albert Camus, ''The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays'',
Justin O’Brien (trans.), Random House, New York, NY, 1991.
Originally published in France as ''Le Mythe de Sisyphe''
by Librairie Gallimard, 1942.  First published in the
United States by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

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