Platypus of Truth

The Legend of Zelda: best fifty dollars my parents ever spent. After 15 years, it still holds all its charm. Here's to the glory days, Nintendo!

Battling a cold these past two days.

The mad dash to get to the weekend has begun! For the next twenty-four hours, I'm keeping off the highway...

Because Life Feels Like This Today!

There's always something heart-breaking in seeing or hearing about a place you love but can't get back to. -of realizing that life goes on without you there. It's human nature to expect time to stand still, even when we know that it doesn't. Something peculiar strikes me every time I finish reading the Oresteia . Three quarters of the way through the final act, Orestes has left the building and the play keeps going. All this time we've been concerned with Orestes, and we're suddenly reminded that he's not what the story was really about. Thus the play goes on without him. Aeschylus teaches us an important lesson in this: we are not the center of our own play. Since each of us views life through the prism of self, it comes naturally that we suppose that we are the central characters of our life. After all, man is Homo Narratio as well as Homo Sapiens. We construct narratives wherever we go, even if they're as simple as "one plus one equ...

While we're on the topic of theater, does anyone remember where I left my magic mask?

He's Still There...

This is what was on the other side of the hill. -just hop the stone wall in Pratt's back yard. How much of life is an attempt to reconcile past and present? How much of ourselves has already been defined, and how much is open to us to change? These are questions I find myself asking. Most of the time it's about other people. - sometimes it's about me. In Aeschylus' Oresteia , past and present meet and reconcile. Through the sufferings of the House of Atreus, we come to learn that our history and our future are inseparable, and therefore present with us every moment of our existence. Far from being things to be escaped or desired, rushed on to or gotten over with, they are a unity that we must accept with wisdom. Apollo, the eternal youth, attempts to use brute strength to destroy the past, in the form of the Furies, and force the future, in the form of Orestes, and fails. Athena, goddess of wisdom, accepts both and succeeds, bringing renewal and balance ...

Some days just feel like this.

Autumn and spring are the seasons for theater. They are times of transition, when we become more aware of the changes in our lives. On the stage, we see the seasons of life acted out, and walk away with a new sense of the wholeness and unity of existence. For Aeschylus, theater's primary role is to mediate change. In Aeschylus' mind, change is a vital part of life. Hence his repeated use of the thematic "Time refines all things that age with time" in his Oresteia . In other words, all things are ever becoming more and more what they are. The refining process is often gradual; so gradual that we don't even realize that it's going on. Occasionally, however, the inward process breaks out in our lives in startling color. It is those moments that drama deals with. They can be occasions for joy or terror, laughter or sorrow. Each of these is caught up and presented to us with crystal clarity by drama. We put on our performance of the Oresteia in the...