Friday, June 25, 2010

Oh Man, Beware, And Look Toward The End Of Things That Be

The classicist and military historian, Victor Davis Hanson, has written another superb piece on human character. He reaches deep into Greek theater at the dawn of Western civilization and links ancient tragedy to the disaster unfolding every day in the Obama White House. Hanson is a remarkable observer of time past and time present. I have described him previously as a real, live Tralfamadorean, an alien character from the mind of Kurt Vonnegut. Tralfamadoreans had the ability to see all time as a single moment, a temporal landscape as an image much like what we would see looking at the Rocky Mountains. Oh that we could all have such perception of worlds past and present. I could go on from several perspectives, but I'll leave you to read the article and ponder the wisdom of the Greeks that lives within our own time.

Title: from the final chorus of Sophocles's Oedipus, King of Thebes, warning us that we cannot judge until the story ends.

No comments:

ShareThis