In Euripides' Bacchae, Dionysus wraps Agave in such a frenzy of sex and wine that she massacres his son, ripping his limbs from his body and possibly eating some of it. After she parades around his head believing it to be a lion's head, she slowly comes to realize that she has murdered her son. When she (and her father) reproach Dionysus for his excessive cruelty, asking him, "Why did you have to do this?" he basically responds: "It would have been better if you'd never been born."
Some days I feel like that the universe is just like that. Without the sex and wine.
Some days I feel like that the universe is just like that. Without the sex and wine.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
I don't know that the universe ever seems like that to me. I wish it did. It would be easier if we could blame some capricious jackass of a god for our miseries, and realize that at least our suffering has some payoff as a playwright's plot device. Because that means somebody's watching, and somebody cares. Instead I spend a lot of time pretending that there's a cosmic pattern and trying to close my eyes to the secret conviction that nope, it's all pretty much random apart from the thin and tentative strands of society pulling things together as best they can.
I've just finished kassandra by christa wolf and she's suggesting that helena never reached troja! that paris lost her to an egypt king and troja had to fight that war against the greek to garder leur visages. BUT the greek knew there was no helena to rescue, so it was an absurd war.
oh and how much i enjoyed your last email.. you and i, we share the same thoughts, petit diable. i was about to send you something very similar.
and: no package arrived until now, i'm beginning to get worried.