Tragedy

Tragedy is not mere suffering, sadness, melancholia, depression, misfortune, grief, pain, or loss.  Suffering is an evil; it is not beautiful.  No evil is beautiful.  Pain, sickness, death, loss, misfortune, strife, betrayal, and grief are all evil. They are, in themselves, ugly.

Tragedy involves all of these things, but tragedy is beautiful.

Tragedy is beautiful because love is beautiful.

Tragedy and love are mutually inclusive.

There is no tragedy without love.  There is no love without tragedy.

Tragedy is the beauty which subsists in the presence of ugliness. It is the good which is present amidst great evil.  It is the truth which cannot be crowded out by lies.  No state of events can properly be called a “tragedy” unless its present and defining love is true enough to outlive its opposing evil.

Evil is synonymous with a lack of beauty, a lack of goodness, and a lack of truth.  The evil we experience in tragedy only reveals – exaggerates – the kernel of truth, beauty, and goodness intrinsic to love.  The evil characteristic of tragedy is a darkness which serves to amplify our experience of a light too subtle to notice under mundane circumstances.

Every relationship we have with what is beautiful and good is haunted by the mortality of the object’s beauty.  Whatever is beautiful and good in our experience can be crushed.  It can be turned into something ugly.  The source of the tragedy in this case is the relationship of the lover to what is loved.  We mourn, to some degree, the loss of that beautiful thing.  The thing, once passed, is no longer there, but our love for it, our desire to have it remain for beauty’s sake, persists. We experience the absence of it.  Our love outlives the object of our love.

How much greater the tragedy when the relationship is not between lover and beloved thing but between human lovers. 

There is not only loss but the looming inevitably of loss and being lost.  Death is certain.  Love however is not enslaved to death.

As soon as our empathy arises for something overwhelmed by evil, it is because we have already begun to love it.  “What a shame” we say in our hearts.  We, to some degree, desire that thing all but too late.

True tragedy, however, is not sympathy.  We ourselves experience the evil first-hand when we experience tragedy.  There is a difference between feeling sympathy for another’s loss and feeling grief at having lost; between feeling pity for a suffering victim and feeling remorse at having made a victim.  When we experience tragedy, we are not mere bystanders.  In tragedy, one involves himself in evil by being a lover.

Any love knows that tragedy is imminent, but love hopes. It does not merely “move on.”  When we lose someone, we do not forget for our own sake. We place our trust in the immortality of love because we ourselves experience a small taste of that immortality.

Tragedy is the most exquisite form of beauty.  It takes a refined taste to appreciate and is the deepest and most glorious beauty we can experience in this life.  But it is not possible to experience tragedy unless one wills to suffer.