Albert Camus has some advice for the Celtics

Albert Camus didn’t think much about the basketball, but I think he would have loved it.

The Boston Celtics didn’t overlap much with the French philosopher who died in 1960, but if Camus somehow had an overseas subscription to the Boston Globe, he would have heard about at least two of our 18 banners. Camus was a longtime lover of soccer, having played goalkeeper for his college team in Algeria, and even regarded soccer as a metaphor for human life. He saw the morality of sports as gloriously simple in a world of ambiguity: the team was working towards the same goal, the clean-cut battle between good and evil. Win or lose and then it’s over.

I, too, see sports as a metaphor for human life, and have spent the last two years sneakily weaseling stuff I learn about in philosophy, history and English classes into my writing about our silly basketball team. And when I was assigned Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus* last week for Modern European Intellectual History, it seemed like a good time to get cooking on some more absurd connections between it and the Celtics that only a lunatic would try to make, while simultaneously horrifying my professor by misinterpreting all of this horribly. Allons y!

*For this highly-academic effort, I’m relying entirely on the Justin O’Brien translation, copyright Vintage Books 1955

Sisyphus, man. Talk about a guy who understood the championship windows we talk so much about. Every time he started pushing the rock up the hill, his window opened, and every time it fell, it closed. We make a lot of hay about how long the Celtics’ window will be open for, but I think Sisyphus had it right: a team’s window opens and closes every time the season starts and ends. It’s no more complicated than that, and while it may seem ruthless and unfeeling, there’s something happy and beautiful, too: every year, you have a chance. And every year, the rock falls right back down.

You could say that the Celtics made it up the hill last year, and that they’re fighting to keep their rock at the top of the mountain rather than trying to push it up again, but I don’t see that. Sure, they won a championship, but who cares? They had to play the very same 82-game season as last year. Same mountain, same rock. But surely there’s more to it than that, surely these championships mean something? Albert, any thoughts for us?

Camus didn’t write about sports too much, only mentioning how it inspired his later work sporadically later in life. But the simplicity of sports juxtaposed with the total absurdity of life feels oddly prescient for the Celtics right now, who are probably searching desperately for meaning in their upcoming playoff run having already won all there is to win last year. Camus didn’t seem to understand that the simple goals of sports doesn’t apply to the infinitely repeating NBA world in which your legacy and memory is defined by social media clips and guys screaming about you on TV. Not sure why he didn’t consider all that.

What he did consider is the general absurdity of looking for meaning at all in a world that doesn’t seem to care. That’s all well and horrible, but he gives us basketball fans something to work with: “For on the one hand, the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges us toward the greatest quantity of experiences.” Mhmm… ok, so what I’m hearing is that we should all try to win as many NBA championships as possible because each championship is meaningless? The Celtics need to care about this playoff run because all they can do as the absurd NBA team is to rack up Banner 19, then 20, then 21 and so on unto the heat death of the Universe? Right, Albert?

Perhaps, but Camus also thought that we have to be “conscious” of these experiences, “for the mistake is thinking that the quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us.” Now we’re getting somewhere. The Celtics are in control of their experiences, and are not simply at the mercy of who they play in Round 2, or to injuries or to the machinations of Sam Presti building the T-1000 Celtics-killer in Oklahoma City. Boston always has a chance, and they always control it.

This year, they have a great chance with such a good team, but it’s not like that rock is going push itself. There is no larger plan, no narrative god moving the NBA in the direction it wants. Every team makes their own future, without interference and without advantages or disadvantages. Injuries can be random, but they aren’t caused by lightning strikes; sometimes bodies break down, legs get tangled up. It’s all part of the insane human experience that we have transposed onto a basketball court. But that total freedom is what makes basketball worth playing.

“The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”

Albert, I’m not sure if I’m horrified or uplifted. But if we just replace “man” with “NBA team” this seems like all the motivation the Celtics need. They will draw from the passionless NBA world their tremendous strength, afforded the same opportunity every year to make their own way. They experience a championship by being lucid participants in their own lives, not by adding a number to their Basketball Reference page.

So be present, be alive, and pursue another Banner for the feeling it gives you. Otherwise, it’s just a rock and a mountain. Over and over again.