Matt Connors’s Reviews > The Myth of Sisyphus > Status Update

With a thesis-novel, the author displays the truth they feel sure of, their idea, which is opposite of thought (idea=sterile and stagnant,thought=changing or BECOMING) Lucid novelists humiliate abstract “powers” (non-concrete, appeal to depth instead of diversity) Thoughts which forsakes hope and unity glorify diversity, “the home of art” The mind is liberated by thought that knows its limits and coming end.

Absurd creation “constitutes an ascesis (self-discipline)” to repeat and stamp in time one’s experience and view up to then. Great art may, in itself, be less important than the process of creating and chance to overcome one’s demons and get closer to “his naked reality”.

Will enables human creation. Human intelligence drives “the effort to dominate”(to improve at art?). Creation is most effective at teaching patience and lucidity and is evidence of one’s sole dignity: revolt in the face of absurdity and perseverance, even though it’s considered fruitless to do so. Daily effort, self-mastery, attempts to see limits of truth, measure, and strength.

The “Absurd Creator’s”(described in the preceding entry) wisdom is difficult to materialize/live by, to both negate and heighten the process of creation, to “give the void its colors” (p114). Each creation represents a different point of becoming (adoption of experience and molding from) for the creator. The end of creation being death of the creator, as their experiences has ended.

The mind crawls back to hope, it seems, so having an absurd ascesis(self-discipline) to keep alert and lucid is evident. Hope cannot be tackled by indifference or else the absurd attitude succumbs. To understand great art, the dark and humiliated processes must be recognized. To create and tire “for nothing”, to know it to have no future, to see its quick destruction’s value as equal to its preservation.

Even tho Dostoevsky plays with absurdity, he does, in his conclusion, give life an eternity after death, an after life, which negates. He trades divinity, being a creator, for joy. “Dostoevsky’s reply is humiliation,…An absurd work does not have a reply” his claim of future life is what counters the absurd, not it’s Christian character, as Christians can be absurd, with no belief in future life.

In novels and his diary, Dostoevsky explores “logical suicide”, feeling there must be a god but convinced god doesn’t exist, he condemns that state he finds himself in to be destroyed with himself, at the end. With no god we serve no higher being, we are the creator, we serve ourselves, we become god with our dreadful freedom.

It is a struggle to maintain lucidity, to hold and endure the tension of the absurd, to make no judgements while engaging with our phenomena. “There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.”p103

Philo novels seem convinced of uselessness of principle explanation and instead are directed towards a mimic of one’s philo, instead describing an implication of the philo. Expressing phenomena of experience and illuminating quantity of existence.

Thinking is constructing a world for one’s self, starting out from the tense absurd. Philosophers are creators, inseparable from their philo and self (no claim to be a neutral observer explaining a cosmic philo, distancing artists from art). Some more fruitful philo works have been novels as they describe a created world, as opposed to explaining via essay or choosing style via poem over thought.