What is sisyphus rock?

Albert Camus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Albert Camus answers

The rock is the labor that cannot be completed; it is the weight a man pushes upward with his whole body — face pressed against stone, shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, earth-clotted hands gripping — only to watch it rush back down the moment the summit is reached.¹ But that is the surface of it. What interests me is not the rock as object.

It is the rock as condition. Sisyphus is the absurd hero not despite his torture but through it — his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, his passion for life are precisely what earned him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.² The rock is the shape that passion takes when the universe refuses to answer it.

There is something more. When he descends — that pause, that breathing-space between one effort and the next — Sisyphus is superior to his fate. The lucidity that was meant to constitute his torture crowns his victory instead. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.³ The rock, then, is not his punishment. It is his. It belongs to him in the way that a man's life belongs to him when he has stopped waiting for it to mean something beyond itself.⁴

Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.⁵ That is the whole argument. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Sources

1. one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.

   The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 23

2. Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

   The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 23

3. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

   The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 23

4. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing.

   The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 24

5. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world.

   The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 24