Albert Camus

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For most of the 1940s, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were read as two faces of the same movement, friends who had met during the Occupation and who shared a magazine, Les Temps Modernes, that Sartre edited and Camus wrote for. The friendship did not survive Camus's 1951 book The Rebel, a long argument against revolutionary violence that took direct aim at the Soviet Union's record and, by implication, at the fellow-travelling sympathies of much of the French left, Sartre included. Les Temps Modernes ran a review by Francis Jeanson that dismissed the book as politically naive and philosophically thin; Camus answered with an open letter to Sartre rather than to the reviewer, and Sartre answered back in kind, in print, ending the friendship in public rather than in private. The disagreement was never really about literary style. It was about how far a person committed to justice could go in excusing violence done in justice's name, with Camus refusing any excuse and Sartre unwilling to abandon the Soviet experiment outright. The two men did not speak again in any real way, though Sartre, on hearing of Camus's death in a car accident in January 1960, wrote a public tribute calling him one of the last great representatives of a certain kind of moral seriousness, a generous word from a man who had broken with him for good eight years earlier.