Tonight I had dinner with my daughter, Tanushka.
Nothing remarkable.
Good food, easy conversation, the comfort of familiarity.
The kind of evening that disappears as soon as it ends.
And yet, as I watched her speak,
something beneath the moment came into view.
This scene, a parent and child, warmth, attention, shared time,
has played out in some form since the earliest flickers of human consciousness.
Since meals around the fire.
Since the moment we first understood that we would die.
That thought pulled me, unexpectedly, to Camus.
To Sisyphus, locked in the quiet poetry of the absurd.
The endless cycle of effort, love, loss, and death,
repeating without explanation or resolution.
And I felt warm.
Not despite the absurdity, but because of it.
Camus imagined Sisyphus content because he remained aware.
Conscious of the futility, yet choosing to push the stone anyway.
But I’ve always felt something was missing from that image.
Connection.
Sisyphus alone embodies heroism.
Sisyphus with a child embodies humanity.
The repetition doesn’t drain the act of meaning.
It roots it.
Love doesn’t ask to be justified or admired.
It doesn’t seek universality.
It only asks for presence.
Thomas Nagel once argued that we can never truly know
what it is like to be another creature.
In the narrow sense, he’s right.
I will never know what it is like to be a bat.
But I do know what it is like to be myself.
And I recognise this feeling
the quiet acknowledgement of absurdity
intertwined with love
as something deeply shared.
I suspect many others have felt it,
even if only for a moment.
I find myself wanting other fathers to feel it too.
As…