Anti-Sisyphus: The Future is Not What it Used to Be – a photograph by Gilbert Garcin

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Notes

1. In Camus’s famous conclusion to “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”—a tragic “absurd hero” victorious over the futility that is his destiny, over the wretchedness of the human condition. In the case of Franz Kafka, subject of the appendix to the same essay, this recognition-of-and-resignation-to-absurdity-as-escape-from-absurdity is recast as the triumph of hope over nostalgia, or over the “phantoms of regret” (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage-Random, 1991), 119–138.

2. Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work, ed. and trans. Christopher Maurer, rev. ed. (Chicago, IL: Swan Isle, 2012), 56.