Tragedy

I do not remember if I wrote this post before or not.

If I have, it was as random as this, but maybe I can do a better job now.

Antigone

In school, I had to read Antigone by Sophokles.
Before we even started reading, our teacher explained that this piece was a classic Greek tragedy and that meant, that there would be no happy end and that everybody died instead - as always.

It made absolutely no sense to me, why anyone would write such a story, to begin with. Consequently, it made even less sense for me to read that story.

Why do I have to learn this ?

I will never need that later in life

I was in luck and the plot is summed up quite easily.

Antigone has to bury her brother, who died fighting against the king and the king can not let her.
There is also a queen and a woman called Ismene and they are all relatives of Oedipus and inbred.
Because finally the king buries Antigone alive, the queen commits suicide and the king tries to dig up Antigone and when she is already dead, he kills himself, too. And everybody else also dies or is miserable.

That is at least, how I remember it.

The piece is a play, so there is a narrator, but mostly it is written as a dialogue.

There are different scenes, where all the characters explain themselves, and it becomes clearer and clearer, that each individual in this story knows that their actions will lead to an inevitable tragedy, but none of them can escape their role.

Late realization

Surprisingly many of the things I had to learn in school, started to fall in place only later in life.

This is also why I still believe in a state-run, humanistic school model ... but that is for another post, maybe.

Those ancient Greeks were pretty clever.

Perhaps better:

Nothing new under the sun.

Whenever looking at global politics or things of that nature, I easily fall for the fallacy to single out an individual person, or group, or perhaps mindset, that causes all this tragedy. It seems to be part of how the human mind works; we try to categorize and generalize - unless you want to break down every single problem into its atomic parts, you kind of have to ...

In the real world, larger systems are too complex to analyze fully, especially when they involve human emotions and habits.

I am pretty sure this was common sense to Sophokles and his mates and his job was merely to make you understand each characters motivations and feel a sympathy for their role.

In the piece it is easy to see the king as the one, who could just give in and resolve the conflict, by just letting Antigone do her thing - until you get to the part where he explains himself ...
Even Ismene, who just tries to stay out of everything, by doing nothing, does the wrong thing.

So, if you are reading this and thought a particular person or group is to blame for whichever one tragedy to unfold: That is not how tragedies work.

After all, the Greeks came up with it in the first place -They should know.