Sisyphus – ﻼF

“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”

― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus – Wikipedia
Camus, Suicide, and Imagining Sisyphus Happy – Medium.com (4 min read)
The Myth of Sisyphus – SparkNotes
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus

My new logo for 2020

Sisyphus’ rocksack
https://twitter.com/ilincaiurascu/status/1430447925507862528

Peter Singer The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle

John Perry Barlow The Pursuit of Emptiness

Isaac Asimov A Cult of Ignorance

We Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Sisyphus Working from Home (Jason Adam Katzenstein)

On a serious tangent, see below one of the many fucked up cartoon representations of Ireland from Punch Magazine.

“The Modern Sisyphus” (Cartoon), Punch, v. 6 January – June, 1844.

Depicted is Robert Peel (then PM of the UK) as Sisyphus attempting to deal with “the Irish problem” (with the stone representing Daniel O’Connell). One year later saw the start of The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) in Ireland which devastated the native population and produced the 2 million refugees which formed the basis of the Irish diaspora.

Read more about the negative Irish stereotypes propagated at the time.

[The Irish Emigration Museum] Anti-Irish imagery: Then and now
[Thomas Nast Cartoons] Irish Stereotype
- [Thomas Nast Cartoons] Illustrating Chinese Exclusion

Four Day Work Week by Jason Adam Katzenstein

We Must Imagine Sisyphus as having Met Camus

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes —how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous [20] and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus