The Myth of Sisyphus

by Albert Camus

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.

Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy.

This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me.

As for that thorn he feels in his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain.

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten.

What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand.

If it must encounter a night, let it be rather that of despair, which remains lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the intelligence.

If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy.

But, furthermore, melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they don’t know or they hope.

What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply 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?

Half a man’s life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I cannot deny.

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.

To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate.

When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane.

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it.

In certain men, the fire of eternity consuming them is great enough for them to burn in it the very heart of those closest to them.