Camus’ insistence that we “must” imagine Sisyphus happy is rosy, and it’s as “impractical as it is feculent”*.
The insistence is presented as being a practical optimism for survival, like becoming some kind of hero that stands in the face of meaninglessness.
Life isn’t just absurd, it’s also filled with horrors. They’re everywhere and they happen all the time. Camus doesn’t elaborate on this aspect of existence with any perspicacity.
“Camus believed we can assume a view of reality that can content us with the tragedy, nightmare, and meaninglessness of existence.”*
Blunt pessimism is often rejected- but unjustifiably so. We all cope in our own way in the face of the absurdity and the horrors of existence. So, sure, imagine Sisyphus found a way to be happy. But, try not to delude yourself into thinking that “imagining Sisyphus happy” will make existence sans horror. It can’t.
(*The Conspiracy against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti)
“Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.”
- Thomas Ligotti, A Conspiracy against the Human Race
Love is in the air, and it’s out in space too! The universe is full of amazing chemistry, cosmic couples held together by gravitational attraction, and stars pulsing like beating hearts.
Celestial objects send out messages we can detect if we know how to listen for them. Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us scour the skies for all kinds of star-crossed signals.
Celestial Conversation Hearts
Communication is key for any relationship – including our relationship with space. Different telescopes are tuned to pick up different messages from across the universe, and combining them helps us learn even more. Roman is designed to see some visible light – the type of light our eyes can see, featured in the photo above from a ground-based telescope – in addition to longer wavelengths, called infrared. That will help us peer through clouds of dust and across immense stretches of space.
Other telescopes can see different types of light, and some detectors can even help us study cosmic rays, ghostly neutrinos, and ripples in space called gravitational waves.
Intergalactic Hugs
This visible and near-infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two hearts locked in a cosmic embrace. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this pair’s love burns bright. The two spiral galaxies are merging together, igniting the birth of brand new baby stars.
Stellar nurseries are often very dusty places, which can make it hard to tell what’s going on. But since Roman can peer through dust, it will help us see stars in their infancy. And Roman’s large view of space coupled with its sharp, deep imaging will help us study how galaxy mergers have evolved since the early universe.
Cosmic Chemistry
Those stars are destined to create new chemistry, forging elements and scattering them into space as they live, die, and merge together. Roman will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.
Did you know that U and I (uranium and iodine) were both made from merging neutron stars? Speaking of which…
Fatal Attraction
When two neutron stars come together in a marriage of sorts, it creates some spectacular fireworks! While they start out as stellar sweethearts, these and some other types of cosmic couples are fated for devastating breakups.
When a white dwarf – the leftover core from a Sun-like star that ran out of fuel – steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance and lead to a cataclysmic explosion. Studying these outbursts, called type Ia supernovae, led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Roman will scan the skies for these exploding stars to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.
Going Solo
Plenty of things in our galaxy are single, including hundreds of millions of stellar-mass black holes and trillions of “rogue” planets. These objects are effectively invisible – dark objects lost in the inky void of space – but Roman will see them thanks to wrinkles in space-time.
Anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time. So when an intervening object nearly aligns with a background star from our vantage point, light from the star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer object. The object acts like a natural lens, focusing and amplifying the background star’s light.
Thanks to this observational effect, which makes stars appear to temporarily pulse brighter, Roman will reveal all kinds of things we’d never be able to see otherwise.
Roman is nearly ready to set its sights on so many celestial spectacles. Follow along with the mission’s build progress in this interactive virtual tour of the observatory, and check out these space-themed Valentine’s Day cards.
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“But this "almost" is important: never has there existed a state that was really "totalitarian" from this point of view. Never has some form of reaction, a corrective of the total tyranny, been lacking, not even in the Third Reich or Stalin's Soviet Union: in both cases public opinion, the magistra-ture, the foreign press, the churches, the feeling for justice and humanity that ten or twenty years of tyranny were not enough to eradicate, have to a greater or lesser extent acted as a brake.”
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Essays
Even when the foundations seem strong, there are cracks.
“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.”
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”
Remembering Albert Camus, who died today in 1960. Albert Camus wrote The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague. In another one of his books, The Myth of Sysiphus, he helped those who didn't know how to confront a meaningless universe. He described why life, even if it is meaningless, is very much worth living.
We can’t be sure, but Beethoven appears to have been born around the 16th December 1770. He was baptised on the 17th. Eat a cupcake, and try to listen to one little piece of his music today. He gave us so much…
