![]() ![]() Plastic evidently retains coronavirus for up to three days, and I bought the bottle from the shop – and who knows who touched it there? – only yesterday. I later realise that the bottle of disinfectant itself was not disinfected. After having put the disinfectant away, I use my kitchen as normal. My sink, refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher are apparently free of 99.9% of all known germs. I have sprayed disinfectant on my kitchen surfaces. Well, many are now, if they weren’t before. ![]() “Are our lives like that?” Camus and many philosophers after him have asked. It is a classic image of an absurd and meaningless life. Every time Sisyphus got the rock to the top of the hill, it would roll back to the bottom, at which point Sisyphus would roll the rock back to the top, only to see it fall back down again, ad infinitum. Sisyphus had treated some of the gods disrespectfully, and so Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, punished him by having him roll a heavy stone up a large hill for eternity. Camus answers these questions by reflecting on the image of Sisyphus, a mythic figure from ancient Greece. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus addresses a cluster of philosophical questions about how to appraise our lives, including whether life is worth living, how life is absurd, and what could make life meaningful. In this essay I instead consider what Camus’ philosophical classic, The Myth of Sisyphus, reveals about the status of our lives with COVID-19. These days it is his novel The Plague that has naturally been receiving attention. Albert Camus was a 20th century French Algerian thinker who won the Nobel Prize for his literary works. ![]()
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