The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Part 1
I open my eyes- narrow slits; not narrow enough. It's bright, way too bright for comfort. The bus was almost empty. Sunlight streams into the bus - a glint of gold, a scintilla of silver - bouncing off millions of particles of dust inside the bus. Was that a hand on my shoulder? I'm too tired to open my eyes fully. Bony fingers - I hate bony fingers. They remind me of clawing insistent birds looking for a handout. At least birds don't shake my shoulder violently. Red eyes in a hideous face about two inches away. I'm awake; rudely awakened. I'm sure I have my ticket somewhere. Why do they invent jackets with so many pockets? Is that a candy bar… there - a single piece of paper. This has to be it. I wish he hadn't grinned. His smirk made him seem more inhuman. He shuffled to the front of the bus half-heartedly kicking bags out of the aisle onto legs attached to sleeping appendages. Muffled grunts followed his desultory passage.
Faded boards mounted at regular intervals along the length of the bus proclaimed a set of rules - ticketless travel, indecent behavior, carrying inflammable articles-it was all covered. One of the boards was barely held in place by a single screw and dangled precariously over a snoring bundle of rags topped by an oily head that could have ended the fossil fuel shortage. A one-rupee ticket and you were Damocles for a couple of hours. The sides of the bus were a museum of social change. Eager faces peered out from posters for long-forgotten elections. Blurbs for family planning jostled for space with pouting heroines. Pudgy infants with doting mothers shared space with handwritten vituperative censure of political ideals. Paper on paper, words melded together in a mural of the masses.
I dodged a phalanx of porters and tried to blend into the fruit market. There must be an unwritten rule about bus-stations and fruit markets occurring in close proximity. I wonder if there's a Hitchhiker's Guide to Fruit Market Placement. An excerpt may go like this - 'When in the constellation Aramis in the galaxy Rimpodious, keep in mind that Reesian males like to eat fruit after a long journey'. I've really missed the tang that a chipped glass can add to tea. It's been a couple of years since I've sat in an absolute absence of silence and reveled in every decibel. I sit there for a while trying to strain out all other sounds and focus on the loudspeaker forcing devotional songs into ether already corpulent with sound. I sit and listen; I can't hear a thing. My mind is assaulted by scores of memories all tumbling in one after the other - an intricately arranged set of dominos, all perfectly aligned to tumble in sequence. Tumble, tumble, and tumble - from Trivandrum to tennis, from ice cones dripping syrup to grid computing. I look around; nothing's the same as before but nothing's changed. Nothing ever changes but perception. Someone should resurrect public interest in hypnosis - when I snap ze fingers of ze hand you weel feel veery veery sleepy. You weel then wake up refreshed and happy, ze world weel appear to be a nicer place and you weel be nice to everybody. Especially ze guy in the next offize at work - the possibilities are mind-boggling. I wish I could turn my mind off for a while - the bare minimum of synaptic firing required to stay alive; Nirvana without hallucinogens.
Decisions throw me off my mental equilibrium. Everything is going fine until you suddenly need to concentrate all of your mental facilities into taking a decision that affects the rest of your life. Some decisions are easier than others - I decided to take an auto-rickshaw instead of walking - but I still wish one could get rid of the decision-making process altogether. If you haven't been to Southeast Asia you probably have no idea what an auto-rickshaw is. It has three wheels, is held together by techniques entirely unknown to the doyens of automotive engineering and propelled in a manner entirely alien to physics. The fare is calculated using an insanely complicated algorithm that includes a variable number of parameters including how well-dressed the passenger is, and the idontwanttowalk quotient evidenced. These parameters are measured by two beady eyes lodged in a cranium along with other input devices. Also lodged in said cranium is a brain that processes these parameters with inhuman speed. Despite the admirable processing power lodged in the brain, it lacks the ability to assimilate and follow traffic regulations resulting in a ride that is analogous to bungee jumping - you have a hollow feeling in your stomach all the way through and you're exultantly triumphant at the end of it. I paid the man more than the fare he'd computed earlier. I was just glad to be back on firm ground again. I could feel beady eyes atop a bulbous nose boring holes into the back of my head. I refused to turn around.
Udipi or Indian-Chinese cuisine, I was making too many decisions early in the day. Udipi it is. Somehow the thought of greasy noodles with a blob of ketchup on the side didn't evoke my cibarious passions. Steaming coffee with a side of succulent idlis topped off with a bowl of fragrant sambar - it was an appointment with my inner self. Again, if you have no idea as to what an idli is I recommend you scamper over to the nearest Indian restaurant and plead with them to serve you a plate. I watch the waiter for a while. He takes orders from six tables in under three minutes and disappears into the kitchen. A few minutes later he's walking back with a substantial sampling of South Indian cuisine - a feat worthy of a contortionist. Scratchy music wafts out of an old radio on the cashier's desk. The whir of the ancient ceiling fans lulls me. I look about dreamily at pictures of actors long dead but who continue to smile benevolently at the patrons of 'Udipi Paradise, Meals and Tiffin'. Cobwebs and layers of oily grime give some of them a sinister look. It was almost as if time slowed down in this place - people sprawled on rickety chairs, their movements languid in the warm air churned up by the fans. The only person unaware of this singularity in the space-time continuum was my waiter who glided about untiring and efficient. I probably spent an hour sitting there in a stupor before I started to feel hungry again. Another order of the same and I was ready to face the world. The sunlight jolted me back to reality. The noise on the street assaulted my senses; I had a sudden urge to run back into the restaurant and spend the rest of the day building up cholesterol levels.
