The Optimistic Sisyphus

Punished by the gods, Sisyphus toils hard to push the heavy rock up the hill. Unfortunately, every time when he reaches the top, the bulky boulder rolls down. So he must repeat the task again and again in an unending cycle. Sisyphus suffers. His persistent efforts to bring the massive stone to the top of the hill end in eternal failure. And yet strangely enough, Sisyphus is not necessarily a symbol of despair. Hope never abandons him. He continues the struggle. And so he becomes an allegory of the absurd human condition, a metaphor of man's will to control our destiny. Sisyphus symbolises our permanent war against chaos, against violence and crime, against poverty and disease, our never ending battle to fix the problems of the world. Sisyphus actually must be an optimist. In the bottom of his heart he believes that he has a chance to succeed. His journey can be even more important than his arrival. Perhaps, in spite of all his frustration, Sisyphus does find meaning in the vain work. Interestingly enough, Chinese folklore has a legend paralleling the Sisyphean myth. In this version a character named Wu Gang by divine punishment is exiled to the moon and assigned there to do an endless toil. He must interminably chop a self-healing osmanthus tree, which grows back every time that Wu Gang cuts it down. Nature abounds in Sisyphean phenomena. Take, for example, the disk of the sun: It rises everyday in the east from the mists of the morning and sinks into the shadows of the evening in the west. And Sisyphus also personifies the endless motion of the murmuring waves arising and falling in the sea.