Somebody should have really send that God of Gods to some anger management sessions! He was now beyond enraged since Sisyphus had tricked death twice and in doing so that fooled Zeus as well! Lo! Behold! The bad tempered Zeus strikes again! Many accounts do suggest that he lived his life peacefully and joyously till a ripe old age. However, he loved his life too much in the living world and did not wish to go back. He said that once he berated his wife for neglecting her wifely duties and seeing that all was carried out properly, he would gladly come back. Thus when Sisyphus was in Tartarus, he used this incomplete funeral and lack of money as an excuse to come back to the living world. This time he instructed his wife, Merope, that she should not carry out his funeral in the correct order and should not put any money on his dead body so that he has no money to give to Charon, the ferryman of the Underworld, who ferried the souls across the River Styx for a toll. However, Sisyphus was a step ahead once again. Zeus, enraged by such defiance, condemned him to death once again. He managed to escape from the Underworld by tricking the God of Death into chaining himself and leaving Sisyphus himself to be free and go back to the world above. Zeus being Zeus, with his bad temper, punished Sisyphus to death. The first time, in exchange for a never ending spring in Corinth, Sisyphus spilled Zeus’ secret to Aesophus, one of the water gods, that Zeus had in fact kidnapped, Aegina, the daughter of Aesophus. Sisyphus in Greek Mythology was a typical trickster who was the King of Corinth and had managed to trick death, not once but twice! In the eponymous essay at the end, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus uses a relatively unknown figure from Greek mythology, Sisyphus, to elaborate on his idea of the absurd. Yet, Camus does not simply say that life has no meaning and therefore we are caught in a web of absurdities never to know any purpose or aim in life. Hence his much maligned and misunderstood and dramatic opening! So does life have meaning then? Or are we all consigned to a meaningless world and a life that drives us to suicide?įor what else could be the most legitimate action other than suicide, if we find ourselves in the throes of meaninglessness? Well it may not be, but it immediately forces you to contemplate on the meaning of life as that opening lingers on in your mind.Īs Camus himself mentions in the Preface to Justin O’ Brien’s translation of The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, “it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning.” “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Albert Camus, the celebrated French writer and pioneer of the absurd thought, began The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays with this dramatic opening:
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