![]() ![]() An absolutely devastating story about a father and his young son struggling to survive in an inhospitable post-apocalyptic hell. Take, for example, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. By plunging us into darkness, tragedy shows us the light. ![]() Through tragedy, we find gratitude for our (hopefully) less calamitous circumstances. Maybe that’s what the Romans were doing when they cheered on hungry lions in the Colosseum.īut tragedy does more than help us release negative emotions, it allows us to appreciate the non-tragic elements of our lives. More recently (a mere couple millennia ago), Aristotle wrote in Poetics that tragedy existed to bring about a catharsis whereby the audience could purge themselves of their own fear and loathing by witnessing heroic immolation. And it is not just the most recent batch of us humans we have been enthralled by tragedy for at least as long as we’ve been writing things down. ![]()
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