One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
*
Each morning, Shadow and I exit the gate at the bottom of the garden and walk out onto the bank of the canal that lies behind our house. He is leashed for the first few seconds, while I make sure the coast is clear. We could do without any surprises—such as the unexpected appearance of the American bulldog who lives next door, for whom Shadow has an occasionally violent antipathy that is mutual. As I prepare to unleash him, he thrashes his head and shoulders back and forth, the excitement too much to contain.
Then he is gone, a bullet from a gun. North. One hundred meters. Two. Three. Four. Before slowly coming to a halt, turning around, and trotting back to me. As he gets closer, his pace gradually increases, each stride longer and quicker than the one before. To me. And past me. South. One hundred meters. Two. Maybe three—it depends on how he is feeling. He rarely makes four on the second leg these days. Neither of us is as young as we used to be. Finally, he breaks his stride, turns wide, and swaggers back to me.
Finding meaning in life is hard for us, but easy for dogs. The consequences of this insight are profound and unsettling.
We are all immigrants here, on this canal in Miami. I am from the United Kingdom, but this is my sixteenth year of South Florida sunshine. Shadow has lived here for six of those years. He was born in the smallish town of Homburg, near Saarbrücken, on the westernmost edge of Germany. His ancestors, however, originated from farther to the east, for he is an East German working-line shepherd. As is common for the East German dogs, he’s big for a shepherd, pushing thirty inches at the withers, and weighing in just a little shy of 100 pounds. He appears to be completely jet black, but if you look closely, between his toes, you will see that the fur is light brown, making him, technically, a bicolor. For reasons I shall shortly outline, I wouldn’t advise you to get close enough to look between his toes.
The other émigrés on this bank are the iguanas—green iguanas—that hail originally from South and Central America. They are the reason for Shadow’s frenzied charge up and down the canal. Later, in the sweltering heat of the afternoon, they will form the sprawling mess that spawns their collective noun. But at this time of the morning, neither early nor late, they line the banks, spaced at semi-regular intervals. On Shadow’s initial northerly sortie there may be thirty to forty iguanas lined up around 10 meters apart; the southern counterpart is less predictable since the iguanas will, by then, have a sense that something is up and will have taken the appropriate precautions. As Shadow’s thundering footsteps draw unacceptably close, the iguanas successively peel off into the water, one after the other.
In the 1930s, there was a synchronized-swimming ensemble devised and orchestrated by the Hollywood director Busby Berkeley. One of their routines involved them lining up at the edge of a swimming pool and then diving in, sideways, one after the other. The overall visual effect was like the opening of one of those old-fashioned folding hand fans. Collectively, the iguanas achieve something remarkably like this iconic early Hollywood display—just somewhat more, you know, reptilian.
The result of Shadow’s determined efforts is that each morning, scores of iguanas are exiled to the other side of the canal. The afternoon walk will see Shadow bouncing along his side of the bank, scowling at the hundreds of iguanas that now lie on the other side in their characteristic afternoon mess as if to say, “Oh yes, you better stay over there!” But while they might remember the wisdom of doing so during the day, the night is a time of forgetting for iguanas. Come the morning they will have returned to Shadow’s bank of the canal, and this little piece of theater will be repeated, down to the minutest of details.
This unfolding daily drama is recognizably Sisyphean. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a mortal who offended the gods and paid the price with an eternally repeated monotonous task. While he was alive, Sisyphus had generally been accepted to be a tricky and unpleasant customer. Death didn’t seem to change him much. Having convinced the gods to let him return to earth on an urgent errand—largely one of admonishing his wife for her inadequate funerary provision—Sisyphus subsequently refused to return to the underworld.
The punishment handed down by the gods was ingenious and severe. Sisyphus was condemned to roll an immense rock up a hill. Each time he reached the summit—after who knows how long of grueling labor—the rock would slip from his grasp and roll back to the bottom of the hill. Having followed it down, he would have to start pushing it to the top all over again. And that, for Sisyphus, was that—for all eternity.
The afterlife of Sisyphus is usually understood as the perfect embodiment of a meaningless life. While standard versions of the myth emphasize the immensity of the rock and the backbreaking effort required of Sisyphus to advance it even a single step, this does not capture the real malice of the punishment. Imagine, for example, that the enormous rock is replaced by a smallish pebble, one that Sisyphus can easily carry in his hand or slip into his pocket. His task would now be less onerous, but I doubt that its nastiness would have significantly diminished. He must still return each time to the foot of the hill and begin his task again.
The cruelty of his punishment stems not from its difficulty but from its pointlessness. No matter what Sisyphus does, he can never succeed—because there is nothing in this task that would count as success or failure. Whether he reaches the summit or not, the rock will always find its way back to the bottom of the hill, where he must begin his task all over again. Sisyphus rolls the rock to the summit only so that he can do so again. And again. And again…
In its portrayal of meaninglessness as repetitive activity that aims only at the continuation of itself, the myth of Sisyphus is often taken as an allegory of human life. On any given day, any given human might wake up, fight their way through the daily commute, board the same train today as they did on countless days before, reach an office where, minor details aside, they do the same things today as they did yesterday, and will do tomorrow. The net result of all of this? Probably very little. Any achievements will soon be wiped away by time’s remorseless tide.
All through this person’s workday, the outward commute, the homeward commute, the eight hours or more in between, they are surrounded by other people doing pretty much the same things, with the same results, or lack thereof. Perhaps these people are happy or perhaps they are not. They do it anyway. Waiting for them at home, perhaps, are partners and children—children who will one day grow up and do the same kinds of things as their parents, with the same kinds of results, their lives mere notational variants on those of their forebears. Each step Sisyphus takes up his hill is like a day in the life of such a person. We are all, in this sense, Sisyphus. The only difference is that Sisyphus returns to the foot of his hill while we leave that task to our children (if we have them).
The myth of Sisyphus, therefore, poses a serious challenge to the idea that human life can be meaningful. A Sisyphean life appears to be meaningless, and our lives appear to be Sisyphean. In the face of this challenge, we can deny that our lives are Sisyphean, or we can deny that a Sisyphean life is necessarily a meaningless one. Shadow, perhaps more than anyone, has convinced me of the power and prospects of the second option.
Each morning, Shadow exiles the iguanas to the far bank. The very next morning they will have returned, and Shadow must begin his efforts all over again. The iguanas are Shadow’s rock. But not only does this seem to be one of the most enjoyable parts of Shadow’s life, it is also, my intuition convinces me, one of the most meaningful parts of it. A Sisyphean life, defined by repetitive activity that aims only at its own repetition, cannot, we are told by pretty much everyone who has thought about this issue, be meaningful. But if Shadow is right, it can. The challenge of Sisyphus is here answered by the unstinting zeal of a dog. Finding meaning in life is hard for us, but easy for dogs. The consequences of this insight are profound and unsettling.
We may all be immigrants on the banks of this canal, but the iguanas are undocumented and, as such, are often treated harshly by the local authorities. They are classified as “invasive”—meaning that they are a non-native species that is doing damage to the local ecosystem. This is an unpleasant and deeply ironic accusation if ever there was one, issuing as it does from the mouth of the first and by far the most accomplished invasive species.
We came out of Africa and invaded everywhere; and now we facilitate other invasive species by letting them hitch a ride on our ships and airplanes. The iguanas are sporadically subjected to various extermination attempts, almost always involving poisoning. It’s a sad and futile undertaking, Sisyphean in its way. Within a few weeks the numbers will have been replenished from surrounding neighborhoods. But those weeks between local extinction and restoration are tough for both me and Shadow, though admittedly for different reasons.
For my part, I like our iguanas. I have named many of them. In the most recent generation, there is Cocky—he has a very high flight threshold, always the last and most reluctant to seek refuge in the canal. Then there is Bolt—he has a crossbow bolt sticking out of his back. It doesn’t seem to slow him down too much. I once half-heartedly tried to catch him to get a closer look or perhaps even remove it, but couldn’t get close. There is Stripey—largely self-explanatory, that one. Most impressively, there is Big Poppy. That dude is five feet long! Just for a moment, when I first saw him out of the corner of my eye, I thought he was a gator. It gave me quite a shock. After each poisoning, as the new immigrant influx rolls in, I, a dispirited Adam in his Garden of Eden, must begin anew my task of naming the animals.
Whatever sadness I feel, however, is nothing compared with the devastation suffered by Shadow. The first morning after the great poisoning is always, for him, one of confused desolation. His initial northerly charge begins with its usual drama and pomp, only to gradually peter out as he realizes nothing is running from him, and there are no panicked plunges into the water. He tries to change things up a little; a random charge here, a little sprint there, to see if it will disturb any hiders. To no avail.
Eventually he looks me in the eye quizzically, as dogs do when they have encountered a problem they cannot solve. The rest of the morning walk is merely Shadow going through the motions—a pallid echo of his normal self. It is as if someone stole Sisyphus’s rock in the middle of the night. But when he awoke, he did not rejoice, as we might not unreasonably have assumed he would, but instead retreated into despair. Taking away Shadow’s rock has produced not joy but deep existential pain. It is as if, contrary to everything we thought, Sisyphus’s rock turned out to be not his damnation but his happiness.
The happiness of Shadow, on the other hand, is a happiness that originates in, and erupts from, his deepest nature.
What is the difference between Shadow and Sisyphus such that essentially the same life—a life with the same overall shape and theme—could be positively overflowing with meaning when lived by one and utterly bereft of meaning when lived by the other? An obvious, perhaps facile, answer is that Shadow is happy whereas Sisyphus is not. But this is only a relatively small part of the story. After all, we can find ways of making Sisyphus happy without imbuing his existence with any sort of meaning.
Imagine, for example, that the gods decided to bestow upon Sisyphus a modicum of mercy. The rock, the hill, the never-ending, pointless labor all remained nonnegotiable as far as the gods were concerned, but the mercy of the gods was to change Sisyphus’s attitude to these things. Far from hating them, as we must assume he did in the standard version of the myth, Sisyphus—due to the gods’ intervention—now loves these things intensely. He is never happier than when rolling large boulders up steep hills, and the gods have offered him the eternal fulfillment of this strange desire.
I think it is undeniable that Sisyphus would be much happier in this version of the myth. Some might think that this effectively transforms his punishment into a reward, or something more like a reward. But this does not mean his life is any more meaningful. On the contrary, it is arguable that his life is now even less so. In the standard version of the myth, it is possible to see in Sisyphus a certain kind of nobility. Powerful but vicious beings have imposed on Sisyphus his grim fate. There is nothing he can do to change this fate—not even die. He understands the hopelessness of his situation, the inevitability and inescapability of his predicament.
However, in his contempt for the gods who have imposed this fate on him, and in his refusal to be broken by them or it, he endows his life with a kind of tragic, and savage, dignity. This is, perhaps, what the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus had in mind when he concluded his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” with the claim—or perhaps it was advice—that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Whether or not this is what Camus intended, this savage dignity is lost in this reimagining of a happy Sisyphus. The dignified Sisyphus has been replaced by a deluded Sisyphus, a noticeably dumber version of Sisyphus than the one who inhabits the traditional myth.
Reimagining the myth in this way throws into sharp relief the contrast between the happiness of Shadow and that of the deluded Sisyphus, tricked by the gods. Sisyphus’s happiness is not part of who or what he is; it comes not from him but from the gods. The happiness of Shadow, on the other hand, is a happiness that originates in, and erupts from, his deepest nature. It is difficult to exaggerate how important this point will turn out to be.
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Excerpted from The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life by Mark Rowlands. First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Granta Books as The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life Is Most Worth Living. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Rowlands. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
