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

Knowing one is the master of their life, knowing no higher destiny, it returns one back to their activity, where burden will find them once more, as will all the other phenomena at different and overlapping intervals. From this, Sisyphus concludes “all is well”. This fidelity raises his rock, and offers indifference towards the universe. Each aspect of the world being a world of its own.

When lucid folk contemplate their torment, living this existence and listening to the silence of the universe, various little voices spring up from the earth. Joy and sorrow sowed into their words and constitutes diverse experiences, this should be acknowledged, seeing the melancholy and delight in the ephemeral phenomena we live.

Happiness and the absurd are both within existence and have equal exchange value. One can be found in the other. With lucidity of the absurd and happiness, one can discover the diversity of existence, how there is more out there to exhaust. This leads to seeing “of fate a human matter” to be navigated by people.

The struggle of existence is the memory of unity, longing for a nostalgia, and striving for happiness (this is the absurd). Sorrow fills Sisyphus when hid memories spark this longing for nostalgia, the memory of the earth he was pulled from. This “crushing truth” can lessen via acknowledgement, via lucidity.

In daily existence, when passion and intelligence dance as one and result in delight, a discipline forms, of which is a great strength to the lucid. Creating is molding one’s existence. The mind must keep conscious that creation also has no meaning, that individual life is futil, to maintain their lucid liberty. Holding that fatal fate, illusion of another life hold no bound on the mind as it frolics terrestrially

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.