This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sisyphus's punishment, in the old Greek story, is a rock. He is condemned to push it up a mountain, forever, and each time he nears the top it rolls back down, and he starts again. Camus's short essay on the myth opens far from the mountain, with a sentence built to shock: that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth living at all once a person has honestly registered its absence of ultimate meaning. Camus's answer is not despair and not false comfort. It is Sisyphus himself, in the essay's closing pages, walking back down the mountain toward his rock, a moment Camus insists is the one that matters most, because it is the moment Sisyphus is fully conscious of his own condition and fully free within it. The rock will not stop rolling back down. The mountain will not get shorter. But the walk down, Camus argues, belongs to Sisyphus alone, and a person who has stopped hoping for a meaning the universe was never going to supply is, paradoxically, free to meet his own rock without illusion and without despair. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy,' the essay's last line says, and it is not a consolation prize. It is Camus's whole case for how to live inside the absurd rather than escape from it.