One Must Imagine Camus Unhappy

Consigned to hell for rejecting God; Albert Camus, the absurdist philosopher, found himself tethered to the rocky ground of a dry abyss, awaiting punishment. His punishment was not the expected hellfire, anguish, or hard torture. Rather, Camus was compelled to read and re-read Homer’s myth of Sisyphus, accompanied by silent demons who only listened to his thoughts.

At first, Camus happily thought of this new reality not as punishment but as a reward, considering that he had been a heavy reader throughout his life. He had found the myth so material that it became the cornerstone on which he would ground and build his life’s work.

For any reader who may not have read the myth of Sisyphus, it reads as follows:

“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. The gods had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

Out of this myth, Camus concretised the absurdist philosophy, which handled the existentialist quandary of the intrinsic meaninglessness of the universe. Camus believed that the appropriate response to this meaninglessness was not the Nietzschean meaning-making, nor the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, but rather the voluntary acceptance of this absurdity, similar to Sisyphus’ ultimate attitude to his punishment.

Thus, as he crouched in the jagged abyss for decades, reading and re-reading Homer’s myth, under his snub nose, Camus found himself deeply engaged with its philosophical implications. And he was content to imagine his surrounding demons gripped and moved by his intellectual thoughts and their polyphonous vigor.

After all, was he not an artist, gifted with the solid mind of a philosopher?

Only after the first century did Camus exhaust his thoughts and reflections about the myth. He had memorised the entire story by heart, and read it to the point where he had forgotten its inherent value. Now, whenever he read and re-read the myth, he found himself not reading ideas, themes or motifs, narratives or mythologies. Rather, he found himself reading a hollow carcass of words and phrases. Sentences and paragraphs. Pages and chapters.

The myth had lost its story and substance, and the once-great Homer was nowhere to be found. In his place stood a spectral presence, a grotesque parody of language— its words cruelly dismembered from their meanings. The book had lost its smell; the once meaningful text had become an absurd uncanny mirror, reflecting the soulless eyes of Camus.

As this realisation came to his senses, the demons - his silent observers - too sensed the silence of his thoughts. They, who once thrived on his intellectual vigor, found nothing but a wasteland of signs devoid of significance. In a final, cold betrayal, the demons left, leaving him alone and bare in the abyss with the ghostly language that spoke of nothing but its own madness and meaninglessness.

Like Sisyphus, one would imagine Camus to heroically accept the absurdity of his punishment and embrace its immateriality. However, it was in losing his audience, subject to the sole gaze of the gloomy abyss, that he, for the first time in his life, ever truly and deeply considered suicide.

If only one could die in Hell.

And yet, in light of all of this, one cannot help but imagine what would have happened had he pursued the Nietzschean meaning-making, found in “The Will to Power”, or taken the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, found in “Fear and Trembling”. Perhaps then, and only then, would he have not despaired, but rather have found meaning in the one true living and loving God of hope.

One must imagine Camus unhappy.