Camus's answer is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the king who stole the secrets of the gods, in return for which he was condemned by Zeus to spend his life laboriously rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again and having to repeat the labour endlessly, never achieving either the final goal or rest from it. That, says Camus, is life as 'the absurd'. And that is what we are condemned to. We can either be defeated by it, or we can refuse to be defeated. That refusal, tragic, heroic, defiant, is what gives life its glory and even its brief fragments of happiness.