Sublime

Charles Segal, a recently retired Harvard professor of classics who taught my Greek Tragedy course, spoke about how the Oedipus trilogy reminded him of Erik Erikson’s three stages of development. In youth, Professor Segal said, a person struggles to figure out who they are in relation to their parents (a real head scratcher in Oedipus’s case). In

A man’s eros, his capacity for love and relatedness, must be freed from attachment to the mother, and able to reach out to a woman who is his contemporary; otherwise he remains a demanding, dependent, childish person.”

Frost describes his own process of making poetry in a very similar fashion—as a kind of homecoming to a lost part of himself. “For me,” he says, “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

That’s how myths work. Macduff, and Lady Macbeth.

the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond.

Wounds need to be expanded into air, lifted up on ideas our ancestors knew, so that the wound ascends through the roof of our parents’ house and we suddenly see how our wound (seemingly so private) fits into a great and impersonal story.