I was thinking about Sisyphus this morning, and thought/realized, that he himself allows the boulder to roll back down. There is something within his constitution that never allowed him to become fully human, to form a meaning system, to grasp the point of human life: learning. He was wicked and deceitful in life precisely because he could allow himself to reach the brink of understanding, only to more or less consciously forget every time, symbolized in the fall of the boulder. How often do many of us reach the brink of understanding, only to reject it? When only one more push will lead us to a qualitative change, a glimpse at what lies on the other side of the hill? We fear that change, more than we fear monotony and wasted effort. We fear the new far more than we fear a known and long-suffered evil.
Tantalus, likewise, reaches with one hand, and removes with the other. It is literally apparently possible in deep hypnotic trance to make the two hands of one person fight with one another. This is a nice metaphor for what surely happens in the darkness of what we refuse to see, or what we usually call the Unconscious.
To be clear, things hidden need not remain hidden; we can see them. We simply fear the unknown.