Do Hard Things
Albert Camus, the myth of Sisyphus, and late-season pheasant hunting.
You may remember Sisyphus. He was the mythological King of Corinth and a wily operator who (literally) cheated death by chaining Thanatos, the god of death, in Tartarus. As a result, for a time, no human beings died. But that pissed off Ares, the god of war, because what fun is war if no one dies?
Sisyphus subsequently pissed off Zeus by revealing the abduction of his mistress to her father. That was the last straw. Various retellings differ as to when Sisyphus ended up in the Underworld, but they all agree on his punishment: he was consigned to push a huge boulder up a hill, a boulder that Hades had enchanted so that just before it reached the summit, it slipped away from Sisyphus and rolled all the way back down. For eternity, Sisyphus is consigned to the futile task of pushing a rock that will never reach its destination.
I thought of Sisyphus last weekend. I was pheasant hunting in South Dakota. When we woke up on Sunday morning, the temperature was -9° and the wind was 30 miles per hour, gusting to over 40. The conditions were brutal, leading to lots of gallows humor over our eggs and bacon: “We must be crazy!” “What in the world are we doing out here?” And other exclamations of the absurdity of our situation.
And yet, there was no place any of us would rather be.
And that’s what led me to think of Sisyphus — more specifically, Albert Camus’s take on Sisyphus.
