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Updated: July 5, 2025
The reports of continual victories, that roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted all these are beside the real question.
There was Sisyphus, that sees no end to his labours. His punishment is, to be forever rolling up a vast stone to the top of a mountain, which, when it gets to the top, falls down with a crushing weight, and all his work is to be begun again. He was bathed all over in sweat, that reeked out a smoke which covered his head like a mist. His crime had been the revealing of state secrets.
All I have to fear is that my knife may slip out of the line, and draw a drop or two from my fingers: but your kings would seem to sit down to dinner with Death, and to lead dogs' lives into the bargain. They go at last; and then they are more like play-actors than anything else like such a one as you may see taking the part of Cecrops or Sisyphus or Telephus.
What should we say of men if they consumed half their time in paying formal calls upon each other merely for the sake of paying calls, and were low-spirited if they did not receive as many cards as they had dealt out to society? Have they not the time? Have women more time? and if they have, why should they spend it in this Sisyphus task?
Just so when Sisyphus at last once gets there with his boulder, He finds the labour all in vain it rolls down off his shoulder." All on a sudden who should turn up but Caligula, and claims the man for a slave: brings witnesses, who said they had seen him being flogged, caned, fisticuffed by him. He is handed over to Caligula, and Caligula makes him a present to Aeacus.
This pathetic debate "the stone of Sisyphus, which is only the quarrel of man with himself" turns on the loftiest, broadest, most generous motives, touching the very bases of character, and reaching far beyond the issue of '93. The political question is seen to be no more than a superficial aspect of the deeper moral question.
Fate, however, had decreed that I should play the rôle of Sisyphus at Washington. Scarcely were the negotiations terminated when the German Government, on the 8th February, declared the so-called "ruthless submarine war," i.e. announced to the sea powers their intention of sinking armed merchantmen without warning and without regard to crew or passengers.
This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Ixion, and the other Sisyphus. I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property, at least, as much as it is anybody's.
Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that. Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength? Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: "It is enough!" The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the obedience of the soul?
At first, a sense of joy alone possessed me, but soon the great bitter burden came rolling back upon my soul, like the stone of Sisyphus, which my sleeping soul had heaved away. It is a beautiful law of our being, that we rarely dream of that which occupies and troubles us most in the daytime.
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