I’ve finally finished reading Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay I was told to read as an “introduction to existentialism”. It’s not, apparently, a super-technical philosophical work but instead a literary essay, so I hoped it might be an interesting introduction to continental thought. Ha, how wrong I was there: this book was almost entirely incomprehensible for me from beginning to end. I stuck with it in the hope that enough would have diffused into me by the end that I could get something from the conclusion and, armed with that, then be able to understand the rest of it better, but this wasn’t the case at all. Every sentence is an enigma I just don’t seem to have the tools to decipher.

Quite different from reading a very hard piece of analytic philosophy where I know I can get it eventually, and thus end up slowing down. I could go relatively fast through Sisyphus, as it carries you along lyrically, but I had literally no clue what he was talking about.

I’ll come back to this when I learn more in the hope that it makes more sense.