The lessons of the Sophocles play “Oedipus” can be applied to disgraced Penn State coach Joe Paterno.
Roger Clemens tried to bully his Congressional interrogators the way that Oedipus bullies witnesses. To say that he should have handled himself differently is to say that he should have been a different man.
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Sophocles, Yeats (William Butler) | Also tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Sophocles, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland |
Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a [...]
I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation. The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Defoe, David Copperfield, fathers and sons, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry IV, Homer, Human Stain, Lawrence Sterne, Nicholas Nickleby, Odyssey, Oliver Twist, Philip Roth, Road, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, Tristram Shandy |
