Tragedy, the word we use for natural disasters such as hurricanes and man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks, derives from a type of play performed in ancient Athens about 25 centuries ago.
A typical Greek tragedy depicted the downfall of a great personage, often as a result of his reckless pride, and in that respect the Greeks had a narrower sense of the tragic than we do.
But common to their understanding and to ours is an awareness of human beings in the grip of large and terrible forces. Call those forces nemesis, Moira or Katrina–they all bespeak some awful fate. One day you’re King of the Delta, the next you’re wandering blind.
Like the heroes whose misfortunes they portrayed, ancient tragedies were staged to seem grander and more momentous than ordinary lives. For spectators in the farthest seats to see what was going on, the actors wore clogs and outsize wooden masks.
The marble amphitheaters in which they performed gave them an acoustical advantage. Their voices carried over the heads of the audience. Their speeches were written in poetry. Their roles were sometimes those of gods.
But was any Athenian spectator so obtuse, lucky or inconsequential as to not see something of his own danger in the catastrophe unfolding before him?
In that sense, too, what we mean by tragedy and what the Greeks meant come close.
The oversize events that happen in a play or on the news–I am not immune to them. I may not live in Tornado Alley or be a descendant of Zeus on my mother’s side, but all it takes is a momentary collision, a random act of violence or a word of vicious slander to make my life pitiful.
It’s just a shot away, as the Rolling Stones say.
The fabric of what I regard as “normal life” is gossamer-thin, not normal at all. The most apocalyptic passages in the Bible can be fulfilled in a weather report: “In those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.”
A deluge of one kind or another is always possible, and space on the ark is always limited.
What is true of our well-being may be no less true of what we call “our humanity.”
Both are precarious. A tragedy can tell us that as well. We shake our heads at the spectacle of those who responded to the Katrina disaster by looting and violence. But here, too, tragedy is magnifying our lives with masks and clogs, giving us an exaggerated image of how we look whenever our best response to the shared condition of humankind is opportunism.
If our primary motivation in the face of tragedy is what we can make from it–a quick profit, a news story, a political point–then the looter stands for us in the drama. In what may be the best-known literary tragedy of all, Hamlet tells a company of actors that the purpose of dramatic art is “To hold, as `twere, the mirror up to nature.” So, who’s that in the mirror?
We are outraged by the insinuation, as we are by tragedy’s threat to our happiness.
We rebel against both, and the best form of our rebellion is help. By helping those in trouble, we hope to be a little better than tragic. In the ancient Greek plays, it often seems as though there is no help for the fallen hero. The chorus members stand in the background, sometimes with a word of sympathy, just as often with a word of blame, but they offer no help.
In that respect, the ancient tragedies have their limitations–and their wisdom.
Altruism doesn’t bring back the dead. Belated help doesn’t let us morally off the hook. Those poor, mostly black people stranded on the overpass in New Orleans were stranded in other ways for years and generations, and we left them to their plight. Helping does not make us innocent of our past, nor will it make us immune to our fate, but it does make us something more than poor players strutting and fretting away our hour on the stage.
One of the oldest human artifacts we have is three sets of footprints preserved in volcanic ash. They were made in East Africa some 3.6 million years ago by australopithecines. The little we can say about them may, in the end, be all we can say about our own tragic destiny. They were a type of human being. They were walking within range of a live volcano. None of them was alone. Presumably, there was some comfort in that.
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Garret Keizer is the author of “Help: The Original Human Dilemma.”
