CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus
I am sitting in the dark at my rolltop desk and marveling for a few minutes, as I do every night, at our view of Coit Tower at the top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The tower glows proudly, throwing light and mystery out over the city, making me think of the old engravings of the Pharos Lighthouse in ancient Egypt.
Moonlight pours into the room, falling onto a book that lies open on the desk, the exquisite Heritage Club edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis that I inherited from my father. The book still has the unmistakable smell of the well-crafted book, an odor of ink and glue that wafts forth each time it is cracked open. I pick up the book, slowly turn the pages, and feel an unexpected shock of recognition. The Hans Enri pen-and-ink drawings of the ancient gods and heroes bring back blushing memories of the first time I saw the lasciviously grinning Zeus, disguised as the swan, coiled around Leda, Once again I feel a pang of joy from simply reading off the pantheon of names in the table of contents: Daedalus and Ariadne, Actaeon and Artemis, Hades and Sisyphus. After all these years they are still powerful figures for me. I have often reread their exploits, which to me is like opening an old scrapbook full of memories of marvelous friends and family.
Each time I return to them I am surprised by how the ancient tales of sudden transformation force me to think about the strange changes in my own life.
Then I come across the story that has been a part of my own story for a long time. Just staring at the word Sisyphus is enough to make my shoulder ache. I can't even pronounce the old king's name without thinking about my own years of pushing the boulder up the hill. It is a living myth for me, vividly reminding me of my own youthful rebellion, my long struggle with struggle itself.
For seven long years after my post-college world travels I raged against the great dragon doubt. I had dreamed of becoming a writer since I was a boy. Other than fantasizing about playing right field for my hometown team, the Detroit Tigers, I never wanted to do anything else with my life. The problem was, as the poet Robert Bly gleefully pointed out in a poetry workshop I attended in the early 1980s, there are people who want to be a writer, and there are people who want to write.
“Which one are you?” he asked, scanning the faces in the room, busting half of us like a literary cop. In fact, I did want to write, desperately. I just couldn't. My years of voluminous reading and protracted travels had humbled and intimidated me into creative silence. I had a writing block the size of Gibraltar and twice as unmovable.
So I did what all self-respecting wannabe writers do. I read and read and read. For seven long years I painted Victorian houses around San Francisco (forty-four of them in all) during the day, and then back in my apartment in Berkeley I read until the wee hours of the morning.
Eventually I formed a little company with a friend of mine that we called “Painter's Palette,” which boasted the motto, “Custom Painting for a Classic City.” To keep my mind alive during the often numbingly repetitive work, I memorized reams of poetry, a litany of limericks, and a passel of French phases that I copied onto white index cards hidden in my overalls. At night, I stared at blindlingly blank paper in my old Smith-Corona typewriter. I saw myself as a paint-flecked version of the frustrated writer in The Shining, as demonically portrayed by Jack Nicholson. Not unlike him, I used to type hundreds of versions of the same short stories and poems, often without changing clothes after work, living on tunafish and beer.
The horrified expression on Shelley Duvall's face in the movie when she peeks at a page of her tormented husband's writing and sees the same sentence—All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy—repeated line after line, page after page, was a little too close for comfort when I saw it in the middle of my own enfeebling torment.
Regardless of how the writing was going, I eventually sank down onto the futon on the floor, picked up a book, and eagerly disappeared down the rabbit hole of another writer's work. During that dark stretch, I read well over a thousand books, some of them again and again, taking prodigious notes, cross-referencing them in large journals, and often writing short reviews of them. Desperate to write, but even more hungry to learn things that had just been hinted at in my wide travels, I had embarked on a kind of self-imposed Ph.D. program on the world classics. I started a novel, a movie script, an epic poem, dozens of travel stories, but all I had to show for seven years of work was the publication of two modest freelance stories in the local newspapers and a few poems in obscure journals.
No doubt about it, I was frustrated by my lack of progress, but proud of my rebellion against the dead-end life I had left behind in Detroit, as well as the traditional form of journalism I had studied in college. I reveled in my bohemian life, meaning a matchbox-sized apartment, an old car, few possessions other than books, and a life I fancied, of Joycean “silence, exile, and cunning.” I even grew to accept the frequent descents into depression and submersions in melancholia.
It was worth it, I told myself; it's just part of the creative struggle.
Finally, one night in the spring of 1983, during a period of increasing despair that often found me curled on the floor unable to move for hours at a time, my brother Paul called me from Pensacola, Florida. The first word out of his mouth was, “Help!” Then he laughed and added, “I've got a term paper due in my mythology class—in a week! Hey, bro,' can you help me?”
“One week?” I asked warily. “Well, what's it supposed to be about?”
“Hey, how am I supposed to know? No, just kidding. I think we're supposed to write about a myth that we think has some relevance today.”
Out of the blue, I blurted, “How about Sisyphus?”
“You mean the guy who was condemned to roll the boulder up the mountain forever? What's that got to do with us?”
“Yeah, same guy. I think you'd dig his story. I recently read an essay called ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus, the French philosopher, and he said some things that are a helluva lot more interesting than the usual moralistic reading. Camus actually saw him as one of the first rebels, what he called ‘the absurd hero,’ a man who learned how to overcome his fate.”
There was a long pause on the telephone. I ran my fingers through my hair, as I do when I'm nervous, and they got tangled in clots of dried beige paint.
Silence. My brother was carefully measuring my words.
“How did he do that?”
“If I remember right, Camus said that Sisyphus was paying the price for a life of passion, and had learned to accept his ordeal, learned to love the struggle.”
As I spoke those words, I felt a tremendous surge of emotion. I suddenly knew I wasn't just talking about something that happened once, long ago, if at all. By chance, I realized in astonishment, I had stumbled onto a description of something permanent, eternal, in life, my own life.
“Paul, has your teacher told you how Salutius, the old Roman writer, described myth? He said myths were things that never happened, but always are.”
I remember trembling with excitement as I held the telephone. The air around me felt charged, as if after one of those green-skied electrical storms back in the Michigan of our youth. The hair stood on the back of my arms and my scalp prickled. The Camus phrase I had quoted— he “learned to love the struggle”—seemed to hover in
