Camus Wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in Vichy France and Said the Boulder Could Be Joy

Albert Camus drafted The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940, in Lyon and then Oran, during the months when France was collapsing into German occupation. He was 26, working as a journalist whose newspaper had been censored shut, and he produced three books in tandem: the novel The Stranger, the play Caligula, and this short essay on whether life is worth living. Gallimard published the novel and the essay in occupied Paris in 1942. The English translation didn't appear until 1955.

The argument, in summary: human beings demand the world make sense; the world declines. The collision between that demand and that refusal is what Camus calls "the absurd." Almost every philosopher he can think of has dealt with this collision by smuggling in a transcendence — Kierkegaard's leap of faith, Husserl's pure consciousness, Heidegger's being-toward-death — and Camus is unwilling. He insists on staying in the absurd without resolving it, and he proposes that this is, paradoxically, the only honest stance from which something like joy is possible. The book closes with Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill forever, walking back down at the end of each cycle: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

That ending is, if you read it carefully, the opposite of the cliché version. Camus is not saying that Sisyphus likes his job. He's saying that consciousness of the absurd, refused or accepted on its own terms, is itself the meaningful thing. The book also explains why Camus spent the next two decades insisting, mostly in vain, that he was not an existentialist. He had a different argument.