I do not read literature for answers. They sometimes appear: In all its absurdity and darkness, Godot still helps me see more clearly the value of friendship; Moby Dick, what a personal fanaticism can wreak; Macbeth, how political murder leads on to more murders; Ulysses, that love is always imperfect, complex, replete with contradictions.
Such revelations are extras. I read for the questions, especially those so mysterious that definitive answers are forever elusive. As such, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides pose profound questions about the human condition.
From The Persians, do our enemies deserve pity?
From Oedipus, is there some knowledge we should not pursue?
From Philoctetes, in a rigidly hierarchical world, is there a place for repentance and for a change of heart and mind?
From Medea, how are we to respond to terrible personal injustices?
From Agamemnon, is vengeance ever justified?
From Alcestis, what is one individual’s importance in light of the fact of our inevitable deaths?
In almost all of the plays, how are we to respond to the belief of Athenian culture that women are inferior?
In many of the plays, what are our obligations to strangers?
From Antigone, what is the obligation of a citizen when an immoral decree is ordered?
What has also been brought into vivid focus is how the influence of these plays and their vital questions continues into this modern era.
I just finished rereading Waiting for Godot and prepared it, a teacher always I guess, to lead a book club.
Out of many striking and essential aphorisms, these 2 questions came into the sharpest focus this time, one intensely personal, the other universal in its implied call to conscience:
Do you think God sees me? (67)
Was I sleeping while the others suffered? (81)
Great writers have always understood that we never stop searching, and that because we cannot stop doing so, because “we’re inexhaustible (52),” “the air is full of our cries (81).”
