‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ keeps rolling along in modern-day life

It might have been the time, the school or me, but when I went to college the darkest, most dismal writing was the most popular.

So as an impressionable student, I dabbled in literature and philosophy, taking my hip gloominess where I could find it.

If an author happened to write a few dark classics and tragically died young, it was considered a good career move. No future, maybe, but an immediate return on investment.

Basically, if a book had to do with utter pointlessness, back then it passed the test of serious existential writing.

One I recall was John Barth’s “The End of the Road,” which pretty much summed up the genre’s dreary outlook, even if you read nothing but the title. And that would be my recommendation, unless you like depression.

Existential writing could be darkly humorous (Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” is a good example) or simply dark, like Albert Camus’s dissection of absurdity in “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

My attitude these days is that there’s plenty of time to get gloomy tomorrow. And, if you’re a skilled procrastinator, I suggest putting it off indefinitely.

I bring this up not to lead cheers for a positive outlook, but because I’m confronted each day by the Sisyphus of the Used Furniture Community.

At work, we refer to this individual’s occupation as The Eternal Garage Sale. Each day, like clockwork, he hauls chairs, tables and trunks onto the sidewalk in front of his shop.

He hauls them out, and then at the end of the day he hauls them back in. Hauls them out, brings them in with predictable precision.

The last thing I want to do here is belittle this furniture-moving entrepreneur’s efforts to earn a living. But if ever there was a modern-day Sisyphus story, this is it.

With Sisyphus, our hero of futility repeatedly pushed a heavy stone up a hill only to see it roll down again. With our latter-day incarnation, the story is the same but with recliners and coffee tables.

Of course, the goal of the furniture man isn’t to make a name for himself symbolically, but to catch someone’s eye and make a sale.

One thing I got from my exposure to depressing, dreary literature is to see Sisyphus where others might see a man with a chests of drawers.

One ethical consequence, however, is that I think if you see Sisyphus in a used-furniture dealer, you are morally obligated to see it in yourself. How is my daily routine any less repetitive than the furniture man’s?

What I didn’t recall when I made the connection was that the Sisyphus character wasn’t Camus’ creation, but dated to mythology. So I guess it’s even more depressing if you imagine our hero being preoccupied with that stone since before Christ.

I did some reading and found that Camus actually solved the Sisyphus dilemma by – predictably for a deep thinker – analyzing it enough to make it go away.

According to one anonymous scholar, Camus’s conclusion was that “man’s futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values” didn’t require the contemplation of suicide, but revolt.

My take on that is simple. Once you make it up the hill for the 6,084th time, who wouldn’t throw up his hands in revolt and say, “That’s it. You want the stone, you go down and get it.”

And why, I wonder, would you want a stone at the top of a hill in the first place, unless you were building a wall to keep someone’s goats out of your pomegranates? If Sisyphus’ goal was to build a stone house, why would he pick a site on top of a steep hill?

It’s not like they had Ram-tough trucks then. I can see if you were building a pyramid and had Moses’s slaves to do the dirty work, but Sisyphus obviously was someone who never asked for help.

If our modern Sisyphus, the used furniture salesman, doesn’t take his furniture to the curb each day, his bottom line suffers. He leaves it out at night and it could get wet.

There’s a solution. As my late uncle Shecky on my father’s side might have said, “You read an existential novel and get to the end of the road, take a left.” God rest his soul, Shecky was a big joker.

And let’s say you have your eye on a boulder at a garage sale, nice and round and a great buy. Just remember how Shecky’s late wife Shoshana would’ve changed the subject.

“Ooh, look, Sheckala, books! Let’s take a look!! Maybe we can find something good, like a copy of ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ I hear it’s got some great lessons and instantly cures insomnia.”

This story was originally published November 17, 2016 at 5:52 PM with the headline "‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ keeps rolling along in modern-day life."