by Rachel Robison-Greene
From the moment that the weather warmed up, every morning I feel an irresistible pull toward my backyard garden. I wake up and check the news. Congress has defunded a life-saving social program. We’ve bombed another country in the Middle East. A politician has been caught in a lie so consequential that it would destroy the life of anyone else. I suddenly realize that it is crucial—urgent—that I make sure the hydrangeas have had enough water.
Is this cause for alarm? Perhaps I have become so disaffected by recent events that my strategy for coping is simply to run away. On the other hand, it might be more than selfish escapism.
In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus thinks through the implications of the absurdity of human existence. For Camus, absurdity consists in a confrontation between human desire and an indifferent universe. We want many things out of our experience in life. We want our social dealings to be just and fair. We want people who do good things to be rewarded and people who do bad things to face consequences. We want the things we do to be fundamentally important and for our lives to matter in the scheme of things. The universe doesn’t care what we want. It isn’t the kind of thing that is even capable of caring.
By way of analogy, Camus describes the punishment of Sisyphus, who, for the offense of stealing water, has been doomed by the Gods to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity only to watch it roll back down. Camus says,
At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down toward the plain.
Sisyphus could agonize over his plight forever, or he could own the absurdity of his situation. He may not be able to change his circumstances, but he can become the author of his own response. He could become what Camus refers to as an absurd hero. Camus says,
It is during this return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of his consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
It is open to Sisyphus to find a home in the absurdity of his experience. There is beauty and a strange kind of power in that. A person who can embrace the ephemeral, knowing that it can’t be more, is courageous, heroic even. Camus considers examples of what an absurd hero could look like. The actor, for instance knows that the curtain will rise and close within a fairly short period of time. No character lasts for longer than a few hours and will soon be forgotten. Nevertheless, the actor puts their full energy into breathing life into each character.
Don Juan, the archetype of the lover, directs all of his passion into love while knowing each connection will inevitably end. Don Juan, as an absurd hero,
multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus, he discovers a new way of being which liberates him at least as much as it liberates those who approach him. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life. It is his way of giving and of vivifying.
Camus’ account of the absurd hero is frequently criticized for being amoral. The concern is that one could rejoice in the absurdity of all sorts of practices, many of them indefensible at best and abhorrent at worst. Indeed, Camus himself uses the model of “the adventurer” who maximizes conquest in battle. We needn’t follow Camus all the way to that point.
Instead, steeping in the absurdity of the human condition may be a useful kind of existential therapy. My mountain is my backyard garden. I water my plants while fully recognizing that they’ll die if I don’t keep it up forever. Each bloom is a cherished lover. Each berry on the bush is a fleeting life I’ve summoned from the soil. I rejoice in the growth of my plants even while recognizing that it is I, myself, who must cut them back in the fall. I feel a thrill when a butterfly lands on a flower, though I know that neither the butterfly nor the bloom will live past the month. I recognize that none of this matters. The earth would go on spinning if I didn’t have a garden at all. I appreciate it, in part, because of these facts rather than in spite of them.
Camus says,
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises the rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
One always finds one’s burden again. I can’t stay in the garden all day, as pleasant as it sounds. There are pressing problems, things I could do that might matter to someone’s welfare. I can now return to taking serious things seriously, revived by the absurdity of the flowerbed.
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