One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: The Full Sentence

You have already seen the phrase as a photo caption, on a mug, or in a Monday-morning post: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Almost always it appears alone, as if it were the promise that, in the end, life pays off. It is by Albert Camus. It is the last sentence of the essay, the one that closes the chapter that gives the book its name (the appendix on Kafka comes after), and it travels with a companion almost no one quotes. Most importantly, Camus's discovery is not in it. It is before it.

The full sentence, and where it is

The full sentence is two sentences, and they close the chapter that gives the essay its name: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." They are in The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus (1942), in the chapter also called "The Myth of Sisyphus," the Brazilian edition by Record (quotations in our translation), which is the one used for all Camus quotations in this article. In French, the second sentence is Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.

Notice what the first sentence does not say. It says nothing about reaching the top, a reward, or a stone that finally stays put. It speaks of the struggle. When the sentence is cut out and turned into a caption, that part disappears, and what is left sounds like optimistic advice. Camus's text is something else.

The discovery is not on the mug

The find of the chapter comes earlier, and it concerns a specific hour of the day. Camus does not look at the climb. He looks at the interval that comes after it:

"I see this man going back down with heavy and measured steps toward the torment whose end he will never know. That hour, which is like a breath and which returns as surely as his misfortune, that hour is the hour of consciousness."

The hour of consciousness is the center of the chapter, and the mug line is the conclusion of the reasoning it opens. The image becomes clearer when you split it into three moments. On the climb, Sisyphus is busy, and the effort swallows everything. At the top, it is only an instant. On the way down, he is empty-handed and knows exactly what will happen again. This interval is what the lesson in the video calls the hour of empty hands, and it leaves a question: what is yours? The bath at the end of the day, the car parked in the garage, the ten minutes before sleep.

That is why the tragedy is not in the punishment. Camus says: "This myth is tragic only because its hero is conscious." Take away the consciousness, and no tragedy is left. What is left is an animal pushing a stone.

It is not a promise of happiness

Imagining Sisyphus happy does not promise that the stone weighs less. The strongest objection to this reading came from a reader, in one of the Nous study groups. She put herself in his place and said she would go out of her mind. She added the real difference: we repeat the same days, but we have a little freedom, and he did not.

The answer is in the chapter itself. Camus swaps the myth for an ordinary man, the worker who makes the same gestures every day in front of the conveyor belt. He writes that the worker's destiny is no less absurd, but that it is tragic only in the rare moments when he becomes conscious. The objection does not knock down the argument, it refines it. The freedom we have and Sisyphus lacks is the freedom to choose the stone, not to let it go, because changing jobs means changing stones. And it is because we chose ours that ours hurts in a way his does not.

Further on in the chapter the tone is hard: "His fate belongs to him. The rock is his home." That is not conformism. Conformism would be saying the stone is not so heavy, and that is not what Camus writes. The group that read the book with Nous reached, without anyone leading them, a reading without romanticism: he accepted it, or he would go mad. In this reading, imagining Sisyphus happy is the description of the only state in which a man in that situation does not lose his reason. What the myth teaches, and why the worker is a metaphor for modern life, is in The Moral of Sisyphus: A Metaphor for Modern Life.

The other Sisyphus, the one who rests

There is a rest of Sisyphus in ancient literature, and it is not in Camus. It is in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book X. Orpheus goes down to the world of the dead to fetch Eurydice and sings before the kings of the underworld. The song crosses the whole of hell: Tantalus forgets his thirst, Ixion's wheel stops turning, the daughters of Danaus let go of their jars, and the Furies weep for the first time. In the middle of the list there is a short line addressed to him: "You, Sisyphus, sit upon the stone." (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, translated by Bocage, bilingual selection published by Concreta, 2016.)

Compare the two carefully, because the difference is exact. In Ovid, the rest comes from outside. It is not Sisyphus's achievement, it is a concession: someone went down to where he was, sang, and the beauty of another's song suspended his punishment for as long as the music lasted. When Orpheus falls silent, the stone rolls again. In Camus there is no concession at all. No one comes down to you, and no one sings. What remains is the hour of the descent, and it is yours.

One Sisyphus is consoled. The other is lucid. Both are right about the same man: Ovid describes what happens when someone comes down to you, and Camus describes what is left when no one does. The question is not which of the two lied. It is which of the two you have lived more often.

Where to read the chapter

The chapter "The Myth of Sisyphus" sits almost at the end of the essay, runs under ten pages, and is the only narrative part of the book. Read it first, out of order, and then go back to the first page: it delivers the image the rest of the essay justifies. The complete reading order, with the passages that usually stall readers, is in the summary of the essay and the route into it.

Next time you see the phrase on a mug, finish it. The struggle is enough to fill the heart, and what Camus asks is that you see the hour of the descent without deceiving yourself about it. In the video, the lesson goes through the whole chapter: the worker, Ovid's line, and the open question of whether rest can come from outside and, if it does, whether it is consolation or answer.

Continue: The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus: Summary and Where to Start · Titian's Sisyphus: The Painting That Shows the Burden · What is the Meaning of Life? · Gryllus, by Plutarch: the pig who refused to return
Source lesson: O Mito de Sísifo, de Albert Camus