Camus and The Myth of Syllabus

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says, in The Myth of Sisyphus.

So too, one imagines a happy student, book in hand, pushing the syllabus up another class – happy because in the push he writes his own syllabus, for, as Rene Char said, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.”

“Expression begins where thought ends,” Camus says, reminding us then of Wallace Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark…

The blue guitar surprises you.