And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.Īs I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation-that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.īut if we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. So what is the point of beginning the long toil up the hill, pushing and straining sentences along, forcing characters into molds which never quite fit, dragging a chain-gang of second thoughts behind? Olympus will never be reached. Download The Same Old Rock (One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy) - Motorpsycho MP3 song on Boomplay and listen The Same Old Rock (One Must Imagine Sisyphus. Somewhere along the way it goes astray, some link between the sentences does not quite hold.
Experience suggests one never writes the book one plans to write. A Greek myth tells the story of how the gods punish Sisyphus. I sit at my desk seized by sudden doubt, conscious of decades of pointless toil behind me and the few years in front in the certain knowledge that I will never get it right. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," wrote Albert Camus in 1942. Weldon has been made a Commander of the British Empire for her contributions to British culture.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra who was punished by the gods for his greed and craftiness (some stories have him outsmarting the gods who tried to punish him) by being forced to push an enormous boulder up a hill. Her recent book, Habits of the House, is a novel of class boundaries and sexual scandal set in an English rural estate at the turn of the 20th century. And just when I thought I couldn’t go on reading, because I knew that feeling of claustrophobic apprehension, the hero of the book mentioned a quote by French author and philosopher Albert Camus: One must imagine Sisyphus happy. She won a Writers' Guild Award for the pilot episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, a BBC television progenitor of Downton Abbey. Is Jonathan Franzen More Like John Lennon or Paul McCartney?įay Weldon is winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ( The Heart of the Country, 1989) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (1979, Praxis).
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