Thirteen and a half years ago, I published my first article on KineSophy, an analysis of Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In his essay, Camus argued that Sisyphus’s fate of repeatedly pushing a boulder to the top of a hill for all eternity is not as bleak as it seems. A more recent description of a tortuous afterlife seems just as dispiriting as the original Sisyphus myth. In this article, I suggest a similarly hopeful take on a Hell of monotony and suggest that, like Sisyphus, the key to finding purpose in such a Hell depends on physical activity.
Boulders and Books
My original article on Sisyphus and Camus provided an introduction to thirteen years of analyzing connections between physical action and philosophy. Despite the grueling repetition of Sisyphus’s eternal task, I agree with Camus that there is room for hope in this Sisyphus’s fate. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus wrote. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I added that the myth of Sisyphus and Camus’s interpretation have the power they do because Sisyphus’s struggle is physical. We appreciate Sisyphus’s repeated struggles and triumphs because we can imagine the physical effort required.
In his 2009 novella A Short Stay in Hell, author Stephen L. Peck imagines an equally bleak afterlife. In that story, narrator Soren Johanssen and others who failed to acknowledge the one true religion, Zoroastrianism, are sentenced to their own unique Hells. Johanssen’s is an enormous library inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges short story “The Library of Babel.” The library contains every book that can possibly be written using every combination of 95 characters (the 52 capitalized and uncapitalized letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0 through 9, and 33 punctuation marks) on 410 pages, with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page.
Light-Years of Gibberish
Most books are gibberish, just strings of incoherent letters, numbers and symbols. But like the monkey who will eventually type the works of Shakespeare if given enough time, there will be a copy of Hamlet, as well as a book that contains every line of Hamlet except for, “To be, or not to be, that is the Gh8*iL$.” Johanssen and each of his fellow library residents can escape their Hell if they find the book with a complete biography of their mortal life. The problem is that there are 951,312,000 books in this library, a number that vastly dwarfs the 1.5 x 1080 electrons in the known universe. In order to house every book, the library must be at least 7.161,297,369 light-years wide and deep. Absent some incredible stroke of luck, it will take anyone in Peck’s Hell an eternity to find their book.
Monotony and Physicality
Like Sisyphus’s Hell, Peck’s is hellish because of its endless monotony (though while Sisyphus’s Hell is infinite in duration, Johanssen’s sentence is unimaginably immense, yet finite). Sisyphus pushes the same boulder up the same mountain hour after hour, day after day. Johanssen is condemned to searching book after meaningless book in a place where every floor looks the same and all the denizens are white, English-speaking people who lived and died in roughly the same time period.
In my original Sisyphus article, I wrote, “For me, it is essential to the power of the myth that Sisyphus’ challenge is physical.” I added:
“Consider the diminished impact of the following revision of the story: The gods condemned Steve to ceaselessly solving the same Sudoku puzzle. But each time Steve was about to fill in the last number, all his work would disappear and he was forced to start again from scratch.”
My conclusion then was that Steve’s fate seemed tamer than Sisyphus’s. Yet Peck manages to make his version of Hell feel just as dispiriting as in the original myth of Sisyphus, despite the lack of physicality in Johanssen’s torment. He and the other condemned must walk the enormous library if they want to find their book, but their bodies have all been restored to peak physical condition. Early in the story, Johanssen runs toward one end of the library and finds he is able to maintain a consistently brisk pace for hours on end. The condemned can be injured or die, but they wake up every morning restored to life and perfect health. Their sentence is hellish because the task of searching every book in the library is a mind-boggling effort in futility.
Camus Against Peck
In my original essay, I sided with Camus:
“Once Sisyphus comes to grips with the inevitability of his lot, he regains a modicum of control. The rock sits before him. He can drive it up the mountain once again. The gods who put him there cease to matter. The task is in his power to complete. Each successful trip up the mountain is a victory. Each restart at the bottom is an opportunity. Therefore, Camus concludes, ‘the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'”
Is there a similarly optimistic take on Peck’s non-physical Hell?
Variety is the Spice of Afterlife
Unlike Sisyphus’s rote, unending torment, there is some variety in Peck’s Hell. Vending machines offer the condemned anything they want to eat or drink—from foreign dishes to the milkshake from a restaurant near Johanssen’s earthly home. And they inhabit their Hell with other people, even if those other people also share their race and language. The despair of Peck’s Hell comes from the mind. When the characters finally comprehend the vastness of the library and the eons it would take to examine every book, the task appears hopeless. But the same is true for Sisyphus. Pushing the boulder up the hill once is challenging, but doable. It’s the thought of pushing the same boulder up the same hill over and over for eternity that takes the task from punishment to hellish torment.
That variety offers far more opportunities for pleasure and hope in Peck’s Hell. For example, Johanssen has a happy romantic relationship that lasts a thousand years. Given the improbability of finding one’s biography in a comprehensible amount of time, it seems the healthiest approach would be to minimize the time spent focusing on the task. In contrast, losing focus is not an option for Sisyphus, who is (somehow) forced to keep pushing his rock. But occupants of Peck’s Hell should take advantage of the freedoms they have—trying new foods, meeting new people, falling in love, running, jumping and climbing as they explore the library. The gods determined Sisyphus’s purpose, and it is up to him to seize that purpose as his own. The denizens of Peck’s Hell are told how they can escape that Hell, but they are under no compulsion to do anything.
The Search for Meaning
Like Sisyphus, Johanssen and company have the opportunity to define their own meaning and purpose in Peck’s Hell. Unlike Sisyphus, they have more options to choose from. But if there is a purpose to be found in Peck’s Hell, it is not staying in one place in the library, and it is likely not in poring through book after (literally) meaningless book in the hopes of escaping this Hell for another version of the eternal afterlife. In moments of despair, Johanssen becomes overwhelmed by the monotony of his Hell and the monumental odds against escape. Not having existed for thousands of years, perhaps I am in no place to judge him. Then again, neither is Peck, whose existence is much closer to mine than it is to Johanssen’s. But to see Peck’s Hell as monotonous is to ignore the variety that does exist.
On a large enough scale, all diversity becomes flattened. The entire existence of humanity, the whole history of the Earth, are mere blips on the cosmic time scale. An entire planet, an entire species and all its diversity, achievements, failures and passions, will be lost among the eons and the vast reaches of space. But that does not make existence worthless or monotonous to those who live it. Even when existence stretches over thousands of years, there are always new foods to try, new people to meet, new places to explore (even within the uniform structure of Peck’s library). In human lifespans, a single purpose rarely sustains us from birth to death. We find new sources of purpose and meaning as we age and change. After hundreds or thousands of years, so must the condemned in Peck’s Hell.
Meaning in Action
And like Sisyphus, there is a physical component to this search. The denizens of Peck’s Hell must use their minds to define (and redefine) meaning and purpose and use their bodies to explore all paths toward those ends. As with Sisyphus, analysis leads to paralysis. Recognizing the immensity of the task is cause for crippling despair. In fact, since it is impossible to waste infinite time, action is often preferable to meticulous planning. Move, explore, learn—that should be the maxim of those in Peck’s Hell. They should then let let those experiences guide their search for meaning and purpose.
In Camus’s analysis, Sisyphus regains of modicum of control through a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. He separates his immediate task from its place in eternity. He exercises his control by pushing the rock up the mountain once more. So it is in Peck’s Hell. Those who thrive do so by walling off the horrors of eternity in the minds and focusing on their next step, task or goal. They exercise their control with physical action in search of or in support of their purpose.
The Path to Hope
Any version of an eternal afterlife is subject to monotony after enough time has passed. Peck’s Hell is only a sharpened example thereof. In the myth of Sisyphus, physicality provided the horrifying power of the story. In Peck’s version, physicality provides the way out of monotony. Physical sensation, physical action, physical movement—all under the direction of a mind that refuses to ignore the variety that exists even in a limited world—these are the paths to transform a Hellish Library of Babel into a hopeful eternal existence.