President-elect Donald Trump comes to address the crowd during an election night party in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) One must imagine Sisyphus exhausted. One ...

Hermes, the messenger god, eventually dragged Sisyphus back to the underworld, and Zeus soon condemned Sisyphus to the eternal task of rolling a boulder uphill, only for it to roll back down.

Yiyun Li’s memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its ...

In the Greek story of Sisyphus, the king was condemned for eternity to move a massive rock up a hill but never reach the summit. Albert Camus famously saw it as a parable of the human condition ...

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a figure who was doomed to roll a boulder for eternity as a punishment from the gods.

Interesting how Sisyphus was a bit silly and deceitful, and as punishment, he has to push a boulder forever. If he were alive today, he would have become president. Well, either way, Sisyphus ...

Shaking sand from the tangled thready roots of a clump of clover, I could relate. Given eternity to work with, Sisyphus must have come to know every crag and crack and cranny of his boulder. The ...

One must imagine Sisyphus exhausted. One must imagine Sisyphus was up late putting his kid to bed and now the boulder thing again? Didn’t we just heave this boulder all the way uphill?

Once he grasps his fate—“the wild and limited universe of man”—Sisyphus discovers a certain freedom; he gets to determine whether to face the futility of it all with joy or sorrow.

Where time was once “fleeting” and “winged,” now “time stands still, time feels monotonous, and then time becomes Sisyphus’ boulder.” Sustaining Li now is a philosophy of radical acceptance. In it, ...