the pleasure-pain of becoming
turns out i am a masochist, at least for continuous self improvement
i first encountered the myth of sisyphus when we tackled albert camus in my college french literature class. as a west african, i have strong feelings towards the french and camus happens to be one of my favorite authors. his passing comment that the main character of his seminal work, l'étranger, was brought to task because he “refused to play the [societal] game” was amusing to me because you’d think capital crime warrants capital punishment, but this is french postmodernist thinking after all. alas.
in le mythe de sisyphe, camus opens his pandora’s box and unleashes his philosophy of the absurd onto the world. he sermonize that the absurd lies in the heartbreaking moment when one understands that the world is not rational. he wrote:
“At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
le mythe de…
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