On The Boulder Days
— a happy pause at the bottom.
The first book I picked up during this trip was my well-loved copy of Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus.” We were hauled up in a motel and I’d just brought myself down from a particularly not-fun panic attack, fiddling through the the torn edge of page 112 between thoughts about the great amorphous future that made me want to curl up in a hole somewhere and never resurface. I mouthed along as I read — in that way you can only manage with the books you’ve hauled around for a few years, when the words have a grounding effect, wrapping around your middle because they’re warm and familiar rhythms can be so, so soothing.
I was obsessed with the story when I was younger and it’s since become a favorite, steadying metaphor[1] for the numerous messy and unsexy parts of being a person.
After trying to cheat death (in different ways depending on the story you’re hearing) Sisyphus is given a bitch of a punishment: He’s forced to push a boulder up hill for all of eternity and whenever he’s close to the top, everything falls to shit and rolls back down. But, for Camus, there’s something more in that moment right after that rock starts rolling back — the moment where Sisyphus can reflect on how absurd the whole game is and still resume his post, standing tall at the bottom with a smile on his face.
The whole deal can be distilled into something that’s almost motivational: Your work is never done. Your ideas of “done” and “success” and “rest” are a lie anyway and eventually we’ll all be back at the foot of the mountain taking those first steps all over again. You too can make your burden “your thing” and, absurd as it is, let the ascent itself be the thing that fills your heart — because, after all, “happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.”
If you tilt your head and squint it’s uplifting, I swear.
Something about the last line still sings to me in the softest, hokiest way — something that you can only really know once you learn to stop being embarrassed or discouraged and really let yourself take that enthusiasm for words and art (and music and people and work and…) and let it become something solid under your hands.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that 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.
It still feels more solid, to me, than any platitude about perseverance or passion ever could.
My copy of “Sisyphus” has followed me from eleventh grade classrooms (back when I never thought I’d be a writer), from my first bookshelves away from home, back to its first home in my childhood bedroom and then later to my first-ever cubicle before coming with me from coast to coast, bouncing between Motel 6 and Super 8 beds that look too much alike and feel nothing like home. It’s been victim to sand and rain, played host to coffee, cough syrup and orange juice stains. It’s been thoroughly beaten up: highlighted, underlined, dog-eared, spine folded on train rides, bent from backpacks, suitcases and sweatshirt pockets.
A few years ago, I got my second tattoo: Sisyphus and his boulder lurching up the inside of my left arm. He’s all thick dark lines and round muscles that cut a hard contrast against my sad pale skin (as you can imagine the California sun made this all the more obvious.) I've never been all that sure where exactly he is on his journey — if he’s mid-laborious grunt or moments before that blissful sigh.
Today, though, as the miles inch closer and closer to home, it feels much more like the beginning.
[1] Speaking of unsexy: I gave an admittedly pretentious speech about the Camus essay at my high school graduation — because nothing says “congrats on a major educational milestone” like absurdist philosophy. 🎓
[2]If there’s one thing the west coast has given me, it’s a not-so-gentle reminder that I look like someone who just crawled out of a hole after a lifetime of doomsday prepping.
