While commenting about the series Men of a Certain Age in a PBS documentary about the evolution of American television programming, actor Ray Romano mentions the myth of Sisyphus and immediately apologizes for knowing about it.
I’m not trying to sound like I’m smart because that’s the first time I heard of it, was when Mike wrote it in the script.
The reference is to a line spoken by one of the characters in the first episode of the TV series being discussed. The Scott Bakula character says that he couldn’t be a salesman because it’s “too sisyphean.”
sisyphean: adjective. Of or pertaining to Sisyphus; like Sisypus; resembling the fruitless toil of Sisyphus; endless and ineffective.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is a deceitful, murderous king who sets himself above the gods in his arrogance. When he is finally dragged to justice in the afterlife, Zeus sentences him to spend eternity in the hellish region of Tartarus where he has the task of rolling a boulder up a hill. Each time Sisyphus nears the summit, the boulder escapes his grip and rolls away. His punishment is the agony of eternal frustration, an appropriate torment for a life-long schemer.
When Romano was born in 1957, most American school children had been taught the myth of Sisyphus at least by the eighth grade. It was just one more thread in the tapestry of general knowledge that the public school curriculum provided at that time. Fifty-four years later, a popular American actor feels it necessary to distance himself from what has apparently come to be regarded as esoteric knowledge that “regular” people cannot be expected to know.
Not only a decline in general knowledge is evident in Romano’s remarks. His reinterpretation of the myth illustrates the way that American thinking has diminished in scope. Although Romano now knows that the word sisyphean comes from a story about a man who has to roll a rock up a hill, he doesn’t seem to know that the task is Sisyphus’ punishment for being a really bad man.
That [rolling the rock] may seem horrible, but ultimately, he’s happy, Sisyphus, because he has a job, he has something to focus on, something to put his energy into, something to, you know, accomplish.
The study of the Greek myths promotes thinking about universals. In the context of the story, Sisyphus deserves to be punished because he has violated universal laws of human decency. Out of context, he’s just a guy rolling a rock up a hill.
The U. S. public school curriculum has been stripped of much content that used to provide children with food for the intellect and the conscience. With the emphasis on test scores in something called “literacy,” literature and the habits of mind it fosters have become casualties of bureaucracy. The result is a generation of adults who are afraid to “look like they’re smart,” and for whom individual happiness is perceived as being the greatest good in life.