I was just flipping through my notes when I saw The Myth of Sisyphus -Albert Camus.  I may not read all the books mentioned in Mythologies, but I try to look them all up and know at least a little bit about them, so I checked it out on Wikipedia.  The last lines of the essay appear to be “The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This is an interesting coincidence–haha–because I recently turned one of my friends on to reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  For anyone unfamiliar, the novella is about an old man who hasn’t caught a fish in months going on a fishing expedition, where he catches a giant beast of a fish.  After several days of little food or water while catching this thing, he ties it to the side of his boat and starts making his way back to shore, but sharks eat almost the entire thing before he gets home.

I always felt that the point of The Old Man and the Sea, if it were distilled into an oversimplified sentence, was that all your hard work and effort will come to nothing–but it’s worth it to struggle anyway.  The old man stays awake for days, becomes bloody from the boat’s ropes over his hands and back, starves himself, and when he comes back the tourists don’t even recognize what he accomplished.  He’s still broke and starving, living in a shack when he returns–and he starts coughing up blood.  A couple other fishermen, however, look at him with new-found respect, and he feels better about himself.

I didn’t connect the story with The Myth of Sisyphus until something jogged my memory in the middle of Monday’s class and I realized it could be a displacement of the myth, zoomed in a little.  Instead of seeing an eternity of unending struggle, like Sisyphus, The Old Man and the Sea focuses on just a few days in the old man’s life–a single fishing expedition.  Through that, however, we see that he has gone out fishing every day for the last eighty-four days without a catch, and has been fishing for a lifetime before that.  After getting home, empty handed, he is determined to go out fishing again the next day, completing the idea of unending struggle.

This was particularly interesting to me because I had always assumed that Sisyphus had to be a pretty sad guy all the time, while I had always thought of the old man as satisfied at the end.  The idea that Sisyphus could be satisfied with his lot, or experience any emotions other than frustration and sadness, really, had never crossed my mind until I connected it to The Old Man and the Sea.  Even before I read the ending of Albert Camus’ essay, the connection changed my interpretation of the myth.  This goes to show that the recent displacements of old myths are not just ripoffs, they can be just as enlightening to the myths as the myths are to the displacements.

The idea of everything coming to nothing, despite our struggles, and that not being an entirely bad or sad thing, also connected to the closing thought of the day: Belated–somebody was here before you.

I haven’t read James Fenimore Cooper’s famous The Last of the Mohicans, but the movie was pretty good–Michael Mann and Daniel Day Lewis!–and the ending always resonated with me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwgmTo49LQw

Chingachgook (the older guy)’s sentiments exactly echo the idea behind The Old Man and the Sea.  He sees that everything will eventually be worn away by a thousand thousand footsteps, but that doesn’t mean there is no point in doing anything.  All our actions will eventually be made into nothing–sharks will eat your fish, “our race will be no more, or it be not us”–but you can still take pride in the idea “…but once, we were here.”

Thus, though you will disappear and be forgotten, you can still be the precedent behind someone else’s action.

I think that’s as close to a summation of our Mythologies class as I’m going to get.