Word of the Week

One word you might not be putting on a Scrabble board is sisyphean. When you bring your book donation to the door or peek into the donation room while walking towards the back of the Barn, do you ever wonder, “How the heck do they process all these donations?” Ask any volunteer and they will tell you that it is, indeed, quite a sisyphean task! And that’s our word of the week.

Sisyphean refers to the myth of Sisyphus and his eternal punishment. According to his Wikipedia entry, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) who revealed (the forever philandering) Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus in return for causing a spring to flow on the city’s acropolis. Having thoroughly pissed off Zeus, he was sent to Tartarus (the helliest part of hell) to be chained up by Thanatos (the Greek personification of death). Tricking Thanatos into showing him how the chains work, Sisyphus ended up chaining up Thanatos instead. With Thanatos incapacitated, no one died on Earth. Obviously this created a lot of complications! Ares (god of war) was particularly annoyed as battles were no longer fun because no one died so he went and freed Thanatos. To punish his hubris in thinking that he was more clever than Zeus himself, Sisyphus was sentenced to roll a huge boulder endlessly up a steep hill in Tartarus. However, the enchanted boulder rolls away from Sisyphus before he reaches the top of the hill, thus consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of futile efforts and unending frustration.

So in contemporary culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as sisyphean. And while processing, sorting and shelving the books, music, movies, puzzles and games that are donated can be quite laborious, it is certainly not futile because we can see the fruit of our efforts: happy customers finding their treasures! DJR