Today I finally sat down to read Albert Camus' essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.
(Thank you for that Cachorra Mia!)
I read it aloud and finished it with tears in my eyes and great emotion swelling in my chest.
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| free floating, shot on film by Mi Cachorra |
I instantly felt changed by it and wanted to read it again & again, to set so many of its gorgeous phrases to memory, to metabolize them fully and use them to fuel my thinking moving forward.
I'm reminded & struck by the similarities of Camus' Sisyphus to Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return: while Sisyphus was punished by the gods and made to push a stone up a hill again & again for all eternity, Nietzsche described reality as recurring in an endless cycle, so one's life is destined to be relived & relived & relived.
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| reaching for new heights - double exposure on film by Mi Cachorra |
Is the human condition merely one's collection of actions which lead to the forging of our fate, timeless and inescapable? Some would call this tragedy, and indeed Camus wrote,
"[The gods] thought with some reason that
there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
Both writers have been generally regarded as being nihilistic in their philosophies, but I disagree.
Wholeheartedly.
I see both as acknowledging the absurdity of existence, and instead of wallowing in despair, they look beyond and find solace in Amor Fati,
the love of one's fate:
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| double exposure of my heart |
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."