Sisyphus, From Memory

Cover image for Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds by Wendy Xu (2025) | University of Michigan Press

He was a god, or he wasn’t. He was a king, at least. He had some relation to both the gods on high, their glamour and power, and the lowly world of mortals. Of course you must imagine him with the stone, and it was a stone I’m sure, and he pushes it steeply and punishingly up the mountain. If it appears that he is preventing the stone from crushing him more than moving the stone, it’s because he is. In this exercise he is avoiding death more than he is alive.

You must not ever imagine Sisyphus picking up the stone, heaving it onto his chest or broad back, because then you have imagined Atlas, the martyr. Sisyphus’s fate is a result of his cleverness and his unwillingness to die not once but twice, and so Zeus devised to have him live forever and remain at his task. He stole something or somethings of great value, potentially not an object but a woman, or both, and did not show remorse. Why did he steal? For reasons other than altruism.

Why is Sisyphus’ punishment so cruel? When does punishment transcend gratuitous and become almost flamboyantly sadistic? What makes it so?

You must first understand the anxious pride and delusion of Zeus, the punisher. His smallness touches all. You must picture him afraid, tempestuousness, paranoid, volatile, and fragile, meaning, he is exactly suited to devising punishment. To believing in it. He has a carceral spirit. For Sisyphus he must create a foremost temporal experience, so that Sisyphus feels the passage of time even as it will never run out; its passage teases its impossible cessation.

The punishment must also speak to Zeus’s power by containing different emotional stages, a beginning, middle, and even end, which sets the cycle into motion again. Its relationship to narrative is part of its cruelty, as is the relationship of each portion of the punishment to hope. Where Sisyphus will suffer the most, and the least, where he will experience irrational optimism and where he will despair, has been considered. At the bottom of the mountain he must approach the boulder, drop his shoulders and head, place hands, and prepare to push. Though we see him there for the first time, we must remember that he has started there countless times before. Even so, there was a first time, and a second, and a third, and Sisyphus by design may have even experienced confidence bordering hubris in those early attempts. He may have believed that endlessness was only for those others too weak to put an end to their own suffering. This belief against even a god’s will is the innocence and morality of children.

The journey’s middle would be long, and full of suffering. But there must be a penultimate moment, when Sisyphus is able to see the top of the mountain, a place for the boulder to rest, the end of pain. Even the sanest sufferer would dare to hope, if only for that moment. That sensation of progress which culminates in a single engineered moment of disbelief in the permanence of one’s own suffering is the most exquisite cruelty. It’s what separates Sisyphus’s punishment from eternal fire, eternal hunger, any number of relentless physical pains. The centerpiece of eternal hope is most cruel.

From memory, I can’t recall how Sisyphus returns with his boulder (always I attribute the boulder to him, how it’s his boulder, not Zeus’s boulder) from the cruelest moment atop the mountain back down to the bottom to begin again. Perhaps he simply blinks and is returned to his task’s beginning. But I imagine Sisyphus must watch the boulder roll back down the mountain, undoing his labors again, he must have to trudge after it and endure the long unchanging walk. And did Sisyphus ever refuse his task? Thus daring Zeus to confine him somewhere with simpler tortures, the easy pains of hot and cold, nothing compared to the cruelty of an unshakeable desire to try.

Excerpted from Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire by Wendy Xu (University of Michigan Press, 2025). Used with permission.