The Greeks knew, and Shakespeare too, that tragedy is inevitable, and that it springs from our mortality, from our flawed characters and from our intersection with an inhuman, unforgiving natural world. Too often we follow our desires blindly and take actions whose full range of consequences we could never have foreseen. Too often, an accident will take its toll. Through a series of thoughtless and innocent choices, we end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our body’s frailty combines with our imperfect judgments and consequences ensue. I try to cross a busy highway on a bad leg and am struck by a car. Barry Gewen writes that “there [is] no escaping uncertainty” and thus “tragedy [is]an ever-constant presence in human affairs.” *
Camus famously wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Tragedy suggests that a search for meaning and purpose is central to our human natures. We make our purposes, but because we must die, we acknowledge their essential purposelessness. Thus, Camus also asserts that one must feel for Sisyphus’ efforts and agony while seeing that his actions alone, driving that boulder up the hill again and again, could conceivably be capable of generating something like happiness.
A Tragic reality does not mean that we should or must embrace the bleakest view of human life. A tragic view of life is neither cynical nor nihilist. Instead, it gives ultimate value to each human life. Even in the coldest world, the most brutal scenarios, it acknowledges the irreplaceable quality of one life. Lear weeps over and prays for the ‘mad’, filth caked Edgar when he bursts upon him from his hovel in the storm. There may be little in the way of redemption in this life, but there is always room for pity and prayer.
*from The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger And His World by Barry Gewen
