One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The absurd lies neither in the world nor in the mind alone but in their confrontation: the human longing for unity and clarity meets the unreasonable silence of the world. Camus treats it as a starting point to be kept in view, not as a conclusion.
Getting up, tram, four hours at the office or factory, a meal, tram, four more hours of work, and then one day the question why arises in this weariness.
Camus calls philosophical suicide the move by which thinkers who start from the absurd escape it by a leap: they turn the absence of answers into a proof of God or of a hidden meaning. Absurd reasoning refuses this hope as firmly as it refuses physical suicide.
Kierkegaard and Chestov, in Camus’s reading, describe the wall of the absurd with great force and then declare that the wall itself is the door to the divine.
Revolt begins when someone says no to a condition that has gone too far; in refusing, the rebel also says yes to a limit and to a value that belongs to all. Camus sums it up in a cogito of solidarity: I rebel, therefore we exist.
A slave who has obeyed all his life suddenly refuses a new order; his no affirms a dignity that he claims for every slave, not only for himself.
Against doctrines that sacrifice living people to the end of history, Camus calls for a Mediterranean thought of measure, which accepts limits, holds contradictions in tension and refuses to make murder legitimate, even for a just cause.
In Moscow in 1905, Ivan Kaliayev held back his bomb because children were riding in the Grand Duke’s carriage; Camus sees in this refusal a limit that revolt sets on itself.