Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Poetry

The Myth of Sisyphus

by Joe Crocker

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy”
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)

The gods condemned Sisyphus to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Camus argued that this symbolises the human condition, true for all of us: the world is without meaning, and our lives are inescapably absurd. The point is to embrace the struggle with it, and to live without falling prey to despair, or hope, including in the supernatural.

I brace for balance when I work the stone.

…