A School of Patience
“Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
Camus calls creation a school, and the subjects it teaches are exactly two. Patience and lucidity.
Anyone who has tried to make something knows why patience belongs first. The work will not go faster than it goes. You can want it done, you can need it done, and the next paragraph still takes the time the next paragraph takes. There is no shortcut that does not show.
Lucidity follows because you cannot deceive a draft. The half-finished thing sits in front of you being precisely as good or as bad as it is, and no amount of intention improves it. Other parts of life let you coast on the feeling that you meant well. Making something refuses you that comfort.
Then Camus adds the phrase that gives the sentence its weight. Perseverance in an effort considered sterile. He does not promise that the work will matter. He says that continuing to make something carefully, knowing it may come to nothing, is the strongest evidence we have of what he calls human dignity.
The claim is large. The daily act it rests on is small. Keep faith with a standard nobody is enforcing. Return to a difficulty without a reward attached. Very little else asks this of a person.
Work on something today with more care than the outcome will ever justify.
