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Stronger Than Our Rock
by Peter Millspaugh
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain,
whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that
there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” (The Myth of Sisyphus,
Albert Camus) In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, when Sisyphus was an older man, he devised a
plan to test his wife’s love, which she failed, resulting in his death, whereupon he departed earth
and entered the hellish underworld. Having been a great man, the gods allowed him the rare
permission to return to earth, but only to scold his wife. However, upon returning to earth and
enjoying its bright pleasures, he refused to go back to the underworld, against the gods’
demands. To punish his disobedience, the gods sentenced him to an eternal torture. He would
push an enormous boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down. That process would
repeat forever.
The lesson this story communicates at first seems quite simple. Sisyphus was granted a
privilege, acted greedily and defiantly, and was punished deservingly. However, philosopher
Albert Camus takes a closer look in his piece The Myth of Sisyphus. He writes,
One sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it
up a slope a hundred times over… At the very end of his long effort, … the purpose is achieved.
Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward the lower world whence he
will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down… Sisyphus, …, powerless and
rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his
descent. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy… His
fate belongs to him… The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” It was this line that echoed in my head when I first
read this passage in high school. Happy? But how? How on earth could this guy that has to push
a rock up a hill forever be happy? What Camus argues is that, even though Sisyphus must
continue this terrible punishment without end, he has a mental choice. He can choose to be happy
despite his awful punishment. This guy has everything to complain about. He has no sliver of
hope that his suffering will end, but his best option is to scorn the gods – to mock them – and to
mentally overcome the mountain. That is, by deciding to be happy, he takes away the gods’ wish
to see his misery. He cannot change his circumstance, but he can control his own thoughts.
Sisyphus has a choice, and so do we.
Every day, we do things that we might think are boring, annoying, uncomfortable, or
difficult. Here at camp, we wake up each morning to a piercing bugle. Most of us would like to
hit snooze and sleep some more, but instead we scurry down to stand under the coldest water
source on the hillside during the coldest part of the day. After breakfast, we scrub pots, sweep
cracks, cake our hands in kerosene soot, and plunge toilets. On expeditions, we walk until our
legs scream, swat mosquitos until our limbs are more bitten than not, and we eat pasta with more
