The final chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a great celebration of humanity and of our potential. Along with Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism, it is a liberating and poetic description of the control we choose to have in life.
“I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted."
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
I am an ecologist and along with this quote I often think of The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (and The Fountain by Aronofsky) in that they both share this idea of appreciating the details of this world and thus life.
“What struck me on the beach–and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow–was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.”
That quote is from Schopenhauer, and his philosophy was pessimism
“A man is free to want what he Wills, but he is not free to Will what he Wills”
It’s compatibilism, there are many constraints upon us based on environment and context however it doesn’t mean in each moment we cannot actively make a decision with intention. It merely illustrates that we do not have complete freedom (which would be absurd, a divine ability!).