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The Platypus Reads Part X


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 equals two." Thus man assumes that life is the story that he is telling to himself. Aeschylus reminds us that this is not the case. There are far greater actors than we in the story, and we are neither author nor director. As the play ends, Aeschylus brings us to see that not even the Furies, Athena, and Apollo are really in control of events. They too are players in the great drama of God. He alone is the author, director, main character, and audience.

One is tempted to add more, but that defense upon the hill of Ares comes more than five-hundred years after Aeschylus.

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