And in the case of Sisyphus, “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.” Camus says that Sisyphus’s existence was made deliberately and inexorably absurd, which means it’s all Sisyphus can think about, and thus he understands how absurd it is, and therefore it frees him from the distracting illusion of meaning: there is only this singular task, this one struggle. Camus concludes, in a sentence that has been rocking the worlds of college freshmen for seventy years: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
