Once immured in the dark underworld, Sisyphus was restless and unwilling to accept the justice of his fate. As his name in Greek suggests, he is “the crafty one” who devised a clever ruse to chain Hades, the Dark One, to his own stone throne. Strange to say, with the god of death literally enchained, the gravediggers were out of work. No one was dying in the world above. This gravely upset Ares, the god of war, whose love of igniting the desire for battle in men's hearts was now thwarted. Zeus soon learned that he had been twice scorned by the pesky Sisyphus, and he reluctantly agreed to allow Ares to rescue Hades from his humiliating predicament.
Meanwhile, Sisyphus called upon Persephone, the half-time bride of Hades, cajoling her with a mournful tale of longing for his wife Merope (who is immortalized as the seventh—and invisible—sister in the Pleiades constellation) and the need for him to fulfill his duties as a husband and father.
“Let me return to Corinth for three days,” he pleaded. “I am a king. Let me arrange a funeral so my family can properly grieve.”
Persephone was either duped by this clever sob story or else simply empathized with a fellow soul who had been unfairly seized and sentenced. She agreed to guide Sisyphus out of the dank caverns of the underworld and back into the overworld, where Sisyphus paid his respects to his wife and family and the people of his kingdom. But once he had escaped the underworld, and as the ancients said, smelled once more the fresh air of the living world, he had a change of heart and refused to accept the terms of parole. When Hades came calling for him to return to the underworld, instead Sisyphus chose the “sun, warm stones, and the sea” to the hall of horrors awaiting him below.
Outraged, Hades dispatched the messenger god Hermes to collar the incorrigible one and haul him before the Judges of the Dead. For his hubris and his scorn, Sisyphus was condemned to suffer the seemingly most futile and hopeless of labors. In a shadow world of skyless space and depthless time, in a place echoing with the cries of the damned, Sisyphus was given the sentence of shouldering a stone—the very same size as the one Zeus took as his disguise to escape the wrath of Asopus—for all eternity, up the forlorn mountain slope in Tartarus.
At that point in the story, I took a long pause, sipped from my water bottle, and then opened up my copy of the Odyssey and read Homer's own description:
With both arms embracing the monstrous stone, struggling with hands and feet alike, he would try to push the stone upward to the crest of the hill, but when it was on the point of going over the top, the force of gravity turned it backward, and the pitiless stone rolled back down to the level. He then tried once more to push it up, straining hard, and sweat ran all down his body, and over his head a cloud of dust rose.
By now the group was rapt. They leaned forward to hear what would happen next, which is the point of all great stories.
This was the true vengeance of the gods, I told the group. Sisyphus was condemned for all eternity to shoulder the boulder up the mountain of hell, and all the while Hades would be watching for the look of despair that would mark the defeat of another mere mortal. But Sisyphus resolved never to allow the gods to see him defeated by despair. He silently vowed that because his fate was in his hands he could be superior to it. That is the genius of the mythic view of this complex image, that this, “the hour of consciousness” as Camus called it, is born out of the beauty that can be heard in the midst of our ordeals.
The myth of Sisyphus is a living myth, I concluded, because it reveals the inner meaning of our outer struggles. And who doesn't struggle? Who doesn't look for meaning in the everyday drama of their life? The myth personifies the notion set forth in models of drama, from Aristotle to screenwriter William Goldman, that growth comes through conflict, change from response to defeat. Moreover, it presages the marvelous thought of the Scottish poet Kathleen Raine about “the mysterious wisdom won by toil.”
The Terrible Beauty
When I finished there were a few flustered looks in the group, as they were pondering the apparent doom of our hero.
“Now don't despair,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It's not as bad for Sisyphus as it may sound. Remember a living myth is inexhaustible, like great works of art or significant dreams. You don't just listen to Beethoven's symphonies once or look at Vermeer's paintings once or ponder a tantalizing dream once. You go back again and again. It's the same thing with the myths. If you delve into this myth you'll find something new about it—and yourself—every time. There is great pain, but also great beauty, even a rare kind of hope.”
When I was a boy, I told them, going to good old Wayne St. Mary's, a Catholic school run by the blue-and-white-robed sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, they used this ancient tale as a warning. “Look,” said Sister Marie-Walter, “even the pagan Greeks knew better than to insult God. Look what happens when you disobey God. You have to spend the rest of eternity in the fires of hell!” It never ceased to amaze me how worked up those placid nuns could get over the prospects of eternal damnation.
I read the myth again at college, but it wasn't until my discovery of Camus' essay that its power truly touched my life. I described how it had been written at the outset of World War II, as a kind of manifesto for the absurdist movement, and that Camus saw his book as a summing up, “a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.” I admitted to the group that I had read it at a time when I was, as Rollo May describes the plight of Gatsby, someone groping for a new myth that could absorb his “ceaseless failure.” The problem was I didn't know it. Only after I had written about the myth and began to use it in various lectures about the creative life did I come to appreciate the strength of the myth.
I suggested that Camus' mythic vision was seeing how Sisyphus embraced his stone because he came to accept the consequences of his actions. As a man of passionate political convictions, he saw Sisyphus as a fearsome symbol of “futile labor,” but also as a psychologically complex image of transcending the monotony and melancholy of our tasks in life.
The group didn't look convinced, but I plunged ahead.
To some, the tale of Sisyphus may be the usual dish of deceit and retribution, I said, but I'm convinced that it is far more, a fable about the acceptance of one's burden, which makes it as relevant today as it was three hundred centuries ago. At the heart of this story is an image that points to a message that is at the core of the teachings of many great wisdom teachers from Epictetus to William James. It is the moment that Sisyphus watches the boulder roll to the bottom of the hill and turns to walk back down the hill.
“That hour,” I read out loud, from Camus' essay, “is like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
I paused and quoted from memory Camus’ observation that “the price exacted from him for his betrayal of the gods,” he wrote, “was fair.”
What is implied here is that there is always a price to pay for our passionate convictions, whether we are pursuing love, art, or political change. In the end what matters is our attitude toward our burden.
I asked if anyone knew how Camus had ended his essay.
“Zeus gives him a pardon?” somebody joked.
“He escaped?” someone else suggested, hopefully.
“Hades allowed his wife to have conjugal visits?”
“No, no, nothing that easy. Remember that at the time he wrote this Camus was afflicted with tuberculosis and the Nazis had occupied France. He had no illusions about the struggles of ordinary people.