Sisyphus is forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down; for all eternity. Camus famously compared Sisyphus’ condition to the human condition. We too are fated to complete mundane, meaningless tasks, to chase desires and achieve goals only for them to be replaced by new desires and goals; always returning back where we started. Ronald Aronson argues it is our awareness, our human self-consciousness, of this condition that makes us superior to it.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”^[1]

What does this mean as the final line of an essay that “attempts to resolve the question of suicide” ^[2] - which for Albert Camus was a natural corollary of squarely facing life’s meaninglessness? How does the, at the time of writing, 27-year-old’s often chaotic and always startling essay on absurdity end with happiness and joy, after urgently posing suicide as the alternative to living amidst absurdity? And what does it mean to us today, eighty years later?