ABSTRACT
Geography and anthropology, as humanistic sciences, committed both to the experiential as well as to the symbolic, must bracket both every day and Christian life. Within these brackets we see not the myth of victory over death but the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, who stole secrets from the gods, is condemned by them to push a boulder up a mountain, where, at the top, the boulder rolls back down to await the next struggle up to the top, where it rolls back again. "People have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penality in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing". Absurd though Sisyphus may be, heroic he surely is. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart".
