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Tragedy and Triumph

Around 300BC, Aristotle defined the four major genres of literature as comedy, tragedy, epic poetry and lyric poetry.  Now we’ve added more, like the novel, but it’s fascinating to me that Aristotle chose those particular four.  

Of all the genres, it’s tragedy that resonates most with me and I’m sure this is true for many other people.  The fact that he included it at all shows that the concept of tragedy has been with us since our beginnings.  What defines tragedy?  It’s nothing but a seemingly inescapable sequence of events that we know will lead to an inevitably tragic conclusion.

I think the reason that we identify so strongly with tragedy is that we’re often immersed in it and surrounded by it in our everyday lives.  An article in the Guardian last week listed the top five regrets of the dying, according to palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware. The top regret is I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. How true I sense this is, and how tragic to get to the end of one’s life with this regret.  And yet, we live our lives often not being true to ourselves. Despite a sense of knowing from deep within, we seem powerless to break out and so we go with the flow. Every one of the other four regrets she lists are in a similar vein and the result of similar tragedies that play their parts in our lives.

It doesn’t stop there.  We live in a world that is reeling under the pressures of our excesses. We know this and know that we’re part of the problem and yet feel somehow helpless and hopeless in the face of the spectres unravelling before us. We have species teetering on the brink of extinction, rain forests disappearing, glaciers receding. We desecrate nature, inflict unspeakable cruelty on animals and allow our fellow human beings to be subjected to war, abuse, and poverty. And we do it all by choice.  We can’t blame the politicians or the corporations – if they are responsible it’s only because we allowed it to happen. By our silence, our passivity, our lack of courage.  Is this not tragedy on a grand scale?  Is there any doubt at all about the tragic conclusions that will follow unless we change our ways?

I take my hope from the belief I have in our innate humanity.  If we can identify our tragedies, we have it within us to bring about their undoing.  As we face the storm, I can’t help feeling that perhaps our greatest hour lies ahead.

A Journey, Part 1. The Traveller

On this day in 1997, I was in Hungary in ancient the town of Eger.  Hayley and I had left The UK two weeks earlier on the start of our road trip from Camden Town to our home in Simon’s Town at the Southern tip of Africa.  We were travelling in “Fritz”, our old Mercedes 300GD who is still part of the family, though now retired to a farm in the Karoo.

It was a journey that would take us eight months to complete and would lead us through 21 countries before reaching home.  We had no detailed agenda.  We knew we would head across Europe and somehow down the east coast of Africa, but the details of which borders were passable and which routes unsafe was sketchy at best. We’d tried to find out as much as we could before leaving but it soon became clear that most of what we needed to know would only be found out on the journey itself.  It’s possible to travel from the UK to South Africa without ever leaving terra firma, and though this was my lofty goal at the outset, I knew it was unlikely as all Sundanese land borders had been closed for many years.

We’d travelled extensively in Europe before and as we headed east across Europe, the reality of the journey settled in and with it, the excitement and apprehension about the new places, new cultures, and new experiences to come.  Once we passed Vienna, the freezing weather seemed suddenly to intensify and we could hardly wait to get away from all the snow and ice and into the warmer countries further South.  I didn’t know at the time that the people and places I would encounter along the way would have a lasting and fundamental impact on my world view and outlook.

I’ve come to accept that at heart, I am a traveller and never really happy unless I’m on some kind of journey where I’m aware that I’m undergoing change. These needn’t be journeys in the literal sense as this overland trip was – many experiences in life end up taking us on metaphorical journeys instead; We may meet new people, assume new roles, change our outlooks, or fall in love. Looking back, I’ve found that it’s only really through life’s journeys that I’ve grown as a person, and common to all journeys seems to be that the greater the challenge and the deviation from the norm, the greater the growth that comes.

Some of my journeys have been planned and others have started completely out of the blue. Some have come to and end soon after starting and others have lasted indefinitely. I used to think that at some point in my life I would be able to stop becoming and just “be”. Perhaps some people do, but I’ve come to accept that there is at least one journey I’m on that will never end. It’s the quest to discover my true self, and my place and purpose.

I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God. – Sufi Proverb.

Galileo’s Jupiter

I often wonder how much more in-touch people were long ago with other people and especially with nature.  We know so much more now, but are often so fixated on our own agendas and mortal stuff that I can’t help feeling we’ve lost a large part of our sense of place and belonging.

Jupiter is bright in the evening sky at the moment and has been for a while – it’s one of the first “stars” that we see piercing the blue as the evening sets in.  It’s about as bright as Venus and a little further to the east.

Over four hundred years ago, in 1610, Galileo turned his newly invented telescope toward Jupiter and discovered what we have since called the four Galilean moons – Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto.  He first thought they were fixed stars, but soon discovered that they were actually orbiting Jupiter.  I’m sure that the average person back then was much more in touch with the night sky than today, so many people would have known where Jupiter was in the sky and that it was not a normal star at all, but a planet (from Greek – “wandering star”) even though they didn’t really know what the actual difference was between a star and a planet.

Many people today have binoculars, but few have used them to repeat Galileo’s discovery for themselves, even though binoculars are all you need.  It gives me such delight to share my enthusiasm and watch someone who for the first time looks at Jupiter through binoculars or a telescope and finds that it’s not a star at all, but appears as a little disc with at least three of its moons clearly visible.  If you’ve never done it for yourself, there’s never been a better time.  You will need to steady your binoculars by resting your hand against a wall or something stable.  If you find you need to verify that the little pin-pricks of light around Jupiter are really his moons, you can download one of the many a free astronomy programs that will show you their current positions (I use Cartes du Ceil: http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download).  If you’re at all like me, on seeing this for the first time you will come away feeling somehow profoundly grounded and with an increased sense of wonder about the cosmos and this special place within it that we call home.