Another Sisyphus

"Don’t stop. Don’t think. Don’t look up." He wedged himself between the boulder and the slope. He leaned his left shoulder into the rock and pushed with his right hand. He pressed his face against the stone. Its coarse surface scraped against his cheek and jaw. The muscles in his thighs quivered. His knees ached and the edges of small stones cut the soles of his bare feet.

“There is no hill,” he thought. Then he thought “There is nothing but the hill." "These are both true,” he thought.

The boulder rolled for a long time before it came to a stop. It was still longer before he caught up with it. In its long shadow, which was the only shadow in every direction, he sat down and leaned against the coarse surface of the enormous stone. He looked back across the flat parched earth and at the hill, at its long steep slope, and at its summit carved into a flawless blue sky.

There are only six elements. There is the flat parched earth. There is the flawless sky. There is the sun. There is the hill, the boulder, and there is him. The is no water, no wind, no sound. There is the shadow, but the shadow is not an element. The shadow is an effect. It is the only effect except fatique.

In the world created by these six elements, only three things ever happen. He pushes the enormous stone up the hill, or he follows the stone as it rolls down the hill, or he sits with his back against the rock as he is doing now. Nothing is ever different. The sun never moves across the sky, and the sky is always flawless.

He reached down and placed the palm of his hand upon the the parched earth. It was hard and coarse. He rubbed his fingers along the dry surface. He looked up. The unbroken surface of the surrounding plain stretched outward in all directions until it reached the flawless sky interupted only by the hill. In the world created by six elements, where only three things ever happen, he saw the shadow and felt fatique.