Table of Contents
In my favorite chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus, “The Absurd Walls”, Camus enumerates the kinds of sublime strangeness that man runs into when trying to make the world fit his naive yearnings. These include an eloquent paragraph about time, carrying echoes of Heidegger, and one about alienation from others, which includes a callback to Sartre’s “nausea”. Sandwiched in between those is a paragraph about what Camus calls “thickness”:
One level lower, we find strangeness: to realize that the world is “thick”, to glimpse to what extent a rock is alien and unintelligible, with what intensity nature or a landscape can deny us. At the root of all beauty lies something inhuman — these hills, this gentle sky, these watercolor trees, all of a sudden shed their blanket of illusory meaning, and are henceforth further than a lost paradise. The primal hostility of the world, through the millennia, rises towards us. For a moment, we don’t understand, because for centuries we only understood the symbols and the drawings that we placed on the world ahead of time --- but we no longer have the strength to make use of this artifice. The world escapes us because it becomes itself. The stage scenery, masked by habit, returns to what it is. It recedes from us. Just as there are days when, under the features of a familiar face, we rediscover, as if she were a stranger, the woman we had loved months or years ago --- perhaps we even desire that which makes us suddenly feel so alone. But the time has not yet come. This thickness, this strangeness of the world, is the absurd.1
(from The Myth of Sisyphus, my translation, 2024)
This paragraph repeatedly surprises in the directions it takes us. First it starts with the image of a simple rock, calling it alien and unintelligible. This reminds me of the trope of the vast landscape we can see on a grain of sand under a microscope (an idea Camus will return to when he talks about atoms and their quantities). Then, a welcoming landscape, melting into a watercolor painting. Then suddenly, the grand sweep of prehistory: this landscape revealed to be deadly in its primeval state, prior to mastery with words and images. Then the stage of a theater after the show ends and the lights turn back on. Finally and most unexpectedly, the face of one’s beloved, which comes with a flash of recognition of the entire sweep of a human relationship from youthful passion to taken-for-granted to loss --- and the pathos is in how ephemeral this feels compared to the grand scale of images Camus has just carried us through.
This chain of associations started with a mere rock, and I feel that this rock is one of the keys to Camus’s whole idea of the absurd. Camus has an ascetic sensibility, and the most important images to him are often the most austere ones. The ridges of the rock map to the details in the human face. The rock in some sense already contained all the other images that follow it.
In the famous final paragraph of the book, Camus alludes to the “thickness” of a rock once more:
Each grain of his rock, each obsidian glint of the mountain swathed in night, makes up its own world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.2
(from The Myth of Sisyphus, my translation, 2024)
Footnotes
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(from Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, 1942) Un degré plus bas et voici l’étrangeté: s’apercevoir que le monde est «épais», entrevoir à quel point une pierre est étrangère, nous est irréductible, avec quelle intensité la nature, un paysage peut nous nier. Au fond de toute beauté gît quelque chose d’inhumain et ces collines, la douceur du ciel, ces dessins d’arbres, voici qu’à la minute même, ils perdent le sens illusoire dont nous les revêtions, désormais plus lointains qu’un paradis perdu. L’hostilité primitive du monde, à travers les millénaires, remonte vers nous. Pour une seconde, nous ne le comprenons plus puisque pendant des siècles nous n’avons compris en lui que les figures et les dessins que préalablement nous y mettions, puisque désormais les forces nous manquent pour user de cet artifice. Le monde nous échappe puisqu’il redevient lui-même. Ces décors masqués par l’habitude redeviennent ce qu’ils sont. Ils s’éloignent de nous. De même qu’il est des jours où sous le visage familier d’une femme, on retrouve comme une étrangère celle qu’on avait aimée il y a des mois ou des années, peut-être allons-nous désirer même ce qui nous rend soudain si seuls. Mais le temps n’est pas encore venu. Une seule chose: cette épaisseur et cette étrangeté du monde, c’est l’absurde. ↩
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(from Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, 1942) Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul, forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux. ↩