A Little Book of No Consequence
“Do the thing, and you shall have the Power.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation, Essays, First Series
The struggle itself becomes a source of meaning.
— from my Camus episode
Camus gives us a man, a hill, and a boulder with admirable workplace
discipline. The stone never calls in sick. The hill never restructures. The
gods remain senior management.
Meaning does not descend to rescue Sisyphus. He makes it in the contact between
hand and stone, breath and incline, revolt and another morning. This is not
optimism. Optimism expects conditions to improve. Defiance has reviewed the
conditions and begun anyway.
The absurd is not that the stone falls. Everything falls. The absurd is that
we keep finding reasons to place our hands against it—and sometimes one of
those reasons is another person pushing beside us.