Overliving is but tragedy.
I started reading this book on Feb 4th. A lot happened in the past three months and I finally finished it. It was indeed a long journey, but it deserves.
Preface and Intro
The topic of the book is overliving, which might sound thrilling.
the paradox of trying to cure someone who wanted to die and who looked almost dead
The reason of such purpose is
The tragic tradition links overliving to the loss of a particular quality through a single traumatic event.
disgust at life
Overliving is but tragedy.
Tragedy may, rather, be associated with obscurity and bewilderment and the inability to make sense of a story as an orderly whole.
Tragedies of overliving are associated with repetition: time goes on but without the possibility of change.
through which we are aware
death is not the ultimate tragic experience.
Tragic overliving often blurs the distinction between life and death.
For characters who have lived too long, suicide is often seen not as a solution, but as an irrelevance.
Why a end shall not be met? One reason might be “cleaness”
be no end to their guilt, shame, and sense of pollution; no river could ever make them clean.
Another trickier reason is “no difference”. When living hell
Thales, who claimed there was no difference between life and death, was asked, “Why do you not die?” He replied, “Because there is no difference.”?
Of course there might be physical reason that
suicide might be not merely wrong, but impossible.
and suicide may be worse than being killed.
What is the right time to die?
Time is always of central importance in tragedy; tragic time is always out of joint. Tragedies of overliving express the fear that time may always be the enemy of humanity. Time is resisted or goes wrong, lives end too soon or too late.
kairos, the right moment, or qualitative time (to feel that one has lived too long is to suspect that one’s kairos has already passed)
Repetition 如果用轮回这个词会更让人痛苦吧。重复只是重复，轮回是圆圈，是看不到尽头。
The use of repetition enacts the anguishing sense that there is mere addition without alteration
there is always a contrast between overliving and outliving.
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus
What did Oedipus do?
Instead of killing himself, he puts out his eyes.
For Aristotle, Oedipus Tyrannus is
the most important features of tragic plot structure, reversal, recognition.
“Reversal“ is the change of events to the opposite, as has been said. It should happen according to probability or necessity, as in the Oedipus, the man coming as if to cheer up Oedipus and relieve him of his fear about his mother, in fact does the opposite because he reveals who he is . . .
And “recognition“ is, as the name implies, the change from ignorance to knowledge, either in the direction of friendship or enimity, of things defined in relation to good fortune or bad.Recognition is best when it occurs together with reversal, as does recognition in Oedipus. Aristotle admires Sophocles’ conjunction of in the Oedipus.
Messengers, in their discourse, use a series nouns in order to
distance themselves from the horrors by these means.
The remorse Oedipus held is such that
The old happiness in the past was true happiness, but now on this day, lamentation, ruin, death, shame, of all sufferings none of the names is missing.
But why Oedipus has remained alive? because simple death will not be the end of Oedipus’s story.
Nevertheless, I know this much, that neither disease
nor anything else will destroy me; for I would never
have been saved when dying, unless for some strange evil.but also Oedipus himself, who will have to face “the rest of life” in bitterness.
Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus
In Oedipus Coloneus the remorse goes to another level:
Never to be born is best; to die almost immediately is a distinctly inferior second best.
All living is therefore overliving.
The Oedipus Tyrannus confronts the audience with the problem of overliving but offers no possible solution. The Oedipus Coloneus, composed many years later and performed only after Sophocles’ death, suggests that it may be possible to transform an overdetermined and terrible identity into a source of strength.
The last sentence is tricky. Oedipus transforms his past into heroic characteristics, turning him godlike.
Tragedy is easy, compared with comedy, argues Antiphanes’ speaker; one only needs to remind the audience of stories they already know.
Tragedy is going over the story there. But comedy has to be new every time, which is not easy at all.
“fated retribution comes to no one, for the things he suffered first”
Should there be no catastrophe if suffering exempts one from woe.
The past seems to repeat itself; but past character is not necessarily a reliable guide to what a person will do in the present or the future.
relationship between the visible and the invisible. The speech associates the visible with the present, the invisible with the past
Name and Nature
two distinctions between name and nature
Oedipus is hinting at a conventional view of language. The fact that he is called “Oedipus” bears no relation to who he is.”
One might infer that his name has no connection with how he acts, or has acted.
意指不等于实指，指鹿为马亦可。
From the divine perspective, all human life is only delay.
Love and such
Oedipus associates parricide with the desire to go on living: if you “love to live”, you will kill any man who threatens your life, without worrying about whether he might be your father. The love of life trumps all other kinds of kinship or familial love.
Oedipus says he loved his daughters more than any other man will do (1617-19): the one word that redeems all their suffering is “love”: they suffered for their father, but at least he loved them. But no sooner has Oedipus introduced the redemptive promise of love than he uses it to intensify his daughters’ past, present, and future grief. They will never find such love from any man other than their father, and he is gone. The daughters must live out their whole lives without him (1619). They are left with a life that is, they declare, unlivable
好扭曲好不可逆转的好复杂的爱啊！！
Outliving involves the capacity not to repeat one’s past, but to make it new — as Oedipus succeeds in doing. But most people are not summoned away by the gods into magical groves; for most of us, ordinary death is the only end of suffering. We live beyond our proper time without being able to be reborn. The effect of time is, therefore, merely to prolong pain. Most people only repeat suffering until death. Overliving becomes the inevitable condition of all human life.
If we are fools, we may desire more life, but in fact all deaths come too late. To be born at all is, the ode suggests, already to have lived too long, because the proper time for a man to live is never.
写得真好，就算每个人都是出于某种“超龄生存”，如何能走出历史的重复的循环也是力量。
Compare to Yeats’ A Man Young and Old
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly run away.Yeats’s line suggests that there is some kind of unity to the whole life and to the whole person; the perfect tense implies a retrospective realization that it would have been better never to have lived. It would, after all, have been better not to have experienced the desires, pleasures, and love affairs of life. In Sophocles, by contrast, the trouble begins as soon as one is begotten, conceived, or born.
Life is associated not with sex, music, and the joys of youth, as in Yeats, but with the privation of old age…Rather, the ode suggests that all old age is mere negation, loneliness, and loss.
Euripides’ Heracles
The play is a combined version of Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays.
How ‘overliving’ is associated with Heracles?
(1) in this play to endure life is to allow oneself to be dependent on others or even enslaved to them. (2) the play uses overliving to undermine the audience’s expectations about tragic structure more radically
The debate between Heracles and Theseus is :
the nature of courage. Is it brave to die honorably?
He (Heracles) hopes that death will preserve his heroic character…But Theseus suggests that the way for Heracles to retain his honor is not to die but to live. He echoes Amphitryon’s declaration that it is the mark of the brave man to trust in hope.
Theseus suggests that the only way Heracles can be “Heracles” and fulfill the promise of his past heroism is to go on living and resist yielding to suffering.
Theseus suggests that gods and men are equally weak. The gods have, he argues, done all kinds of terrible things; yet they go on living and put up with their own imperfections
He tells Heracles that fate is inescapable.
Vulnerability
the question of how to respond to past guilt and present vulnerability.
at least two incompatible things about Heracles: that he suffers because of the cruel anthropomorphic gods; and that he suffers because he is a man and cannot imitate the independent, unmoved, and inhuman gods.
His immediate motive for avoiding suicide is the fear of being accused of cowardice
There is also an echo of Theseus’s reproach to Heracles — talk of suicide was the language of an “ordinary man”
自杀是一种逃避而已吗，是一种脆弱。
Theseus that his vulnerability is new and unexpected.
But now, it seems, one must be enslaved to fate.
而生何尝不是一种脆弱。
Once he was strong; now, he must be enslaved to fate, and tears fall from his eyes.
He decides to live only after he has asserted that enslavement and vulnerability do not constitute the only possible mode of life.
People, unlike gods, do sometimes dominate one another and do sometimes need one another.
Heracles is here declaring his intention to resist death, rather than to endure it.
against but not suffer
Pride and Hero
Heracles tried to “labor away the death” of his children, he ended up killing them.
To be strong toward death involves living as well as dying, just as Heracles’ labors against death included both protecting and killing. “Enduring death” has come to mean the same thing as “living” since life happens under the shadow of death but nevertheless must be endured.
Heracles’ grief is unworthy of him; heroes should be able to withstand suffering without weeping.
Hero’s pride is above everything, according to Theseus.
Heracles, unlike Oedipus, realizes that he is not abnormal and that he is not free, either from his own past or from human society.
英雄的人性和英雄的社会性
Heracles is acknowledging his own vulner- ability— not simply because he needs a weapon for self-defense but also because this weapon is the bow.
Euripides emphasizes human companionship and mutual dependency as the necessary corollary of a life that goes on too long to be consistently heroic.
看到这里这对真的好好磕 最后一句话完美总结了磕点，不愧是Euripides
Seneca’s Epistles and Hercules Furens
Suicide is a Stoic concern because it is the ultimate gesture by which people demonstrate their freedom from the fear of death—the worst threat to Stoic
…the problem is how to imagine how it could ever be good to go on living.
so one imagines life and death through language, and that the ending is destined.
Closure
the adverb diu (for a long time, protractedly) is unexpectedly applied to death, not life. Long life is only a slow way to die.
The double negative allows Seneca momentarily to acknowledge that all lives end too soon — “no life is not short” (nulla vita est non brevis) — but only in order to support his claim that the length of life is irrelevant to its quality. All life is short, and therefore no life can be too short.
无尽逍遥游之下，众生皆短暂。取决于你对比的对象。
But the analogy between a literal journey and the journey of life becomes, in the course of the sentence, a contrast. Unlike literal journeys, life, however short, is never incomplete: “A journey is incomplete, if you stop in the middle or before the destination; life is not incomplete, if it is honorable. Wherever you stop, if you stop well, life is a whole”
有些人可惜英年早逝，是因为壮志未酬，所以不完整。生命的完整与否不取决于生命的长短，而是取决于梦想的进度条。
For Seneca, there is no need of a proper beginning, middle, and end. Any time is a good time to end, in either a life or a work of literature, as long as one finishes with a proper closing gesture. Seneca’s rhetorical style enacts his theoretical position on closure. He suggests that good writing, like the good life, should be ready to end at any moment: there must be a closing period at the end of every line or every paragraph. As if to prove the point that endings are always available, he immediately ends the letter: “Good-bye” (Vale).
那么西塞内认为什么才是完结的好时机呢——任何时间都是好的。一本好书就要经得起戛然而止，一个真正热爱生活的人应该向死而生，把每一天当作最后一天来活。
We can pluck nothing in life, not even a day; rather, we ourselves are plucked by death
最后人赤条条来，赤条条走，不能带走什么东西。
His living death will be only more of the same, a revisiting of places that are already far too familiar.
Shakespare’s King Lear
Christianity bought a new suspicion that
…the character who feels he has lived too long may be making a terrible mistake, which may be a sign of ignorance or lack of faith in the divine plan
and new fear
Christianity may also intensify the horror: perhaps neither body nor soul will ever be able to die. Perhaps, then, all human beings must inevitably suffer the experience of living too long. Death becomes, for all of us, a part of life, not an ending. The sense of the living body as a burden that can never be cast away…
Rest in Peace became a non-sense under such assumption.
Even death, the ultimate “benefit” and “comfort,” has been taken away.
Let’s go back to King Lear.
He (Gloucester) goes on living in a state between life and death, waiting for the end. He experiences the state of being alive as essentially excessive: for Gloucester in his despair, all living is overliving.
Redeem is priceless by divine.
The play offers no stable account of the nature of the gods. It includes at least
two contradictory theological systems: the just world, in which the gods preserve us, and the world of the storm, in which man is “a worm” killed in mockery by wanton gods.King Lear puns on the word “living,” which can mean “being alive” but also “livelihood.”
Lear here assumes that the “superfluous” is desirable, not burdensome. It is what raises man above the level of the beast; superfluity makes us human. When his daughters think he needs nothing, Lear still retains his desires for the superfluities of clothes, companionship, respect, and other such luxuries. To want what one does not need is an essential feature of being alive — and life itself is unnecessary. Lear, like all of us, will not cease to want unnecessary things until he is dead. But to be alive and to be human also carries certain responsibilities and burdens. The superfiuities of life must be paid for, and this is a lesson that Lear is slow to learn. When he pities the Fool and Poor Tom in the storm, as “poor naked wretches,” Lear acknowledges that the demands of justice might outweigh the man’s desire for what he does not need.
读这一段的时候，我哽咽无语。在李尔王看来，既然生命本身已经冗余，所以人性的彰显集中于外在。那些仪表堂堂金玉其外，意味着生而为人的重任，也象征着煜煜生辉的人性——欲望本身。
But life and time remain when everything else is gone.
Lear becomes, like “the poorest beggars,” superfluous in living when he has no means to support his life.
One replies on faith, something more than superfluous to survive.
The end of the play concentrates on the desire for ending over any hope of long-term political order, and perhaps suggests that such a thing is impossible. In a world where life is torturous and burdensome, the best men will hope only for death, since as long as life goes on, things can always get worse
Shakespeare’s Macbeth
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”
yet he treats his life as if it is already in the past…Macbeth looks at time backward.
Let me quote Carson:”Do not walk backwards, that is how the dead go.” But one can either turn back time, just as you know.
Life as wine
He leaps over his immediate desires, shrinking from naming them: he wants “that” to be done, without having even to say what “that” may be. Macbeth repeatedly tries to live in the future, when the unnameable present action will already have been done. But he also knows that he cannot leap far enough into the future to evade all consequences for his actions.
Macbeth uses the imagery of the remains of a night of heavy drinking in his first description of the experience of overliving. The “vault” that is now empty of everything but lees carries a sonic echo of Macbeth’s earlier “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself”; because he has vaulted over the lives of others, his own life is now an empty vault. What is left when the party is over and the wine is drunk is only talk: “All is but toys.” His life will now be all aftermath, the hangover of the murders he has committed. When Macbeth equates wine with life, he forgets that wine leaves not only lees but also hangovers. Macbeth lives on after apparent pleasure is over and when the sense of potency is gone, but the sickness and headache of its aftermath remain.
I seldom drink but used to drink for academic purposes (yea the wine tasting course), and that slight hangover experience almost killed my following workday. Very bad.
He cannot prevent himself from doing more harm if he goes on living.
living is ruining.
and the analogues.
Macbeth offers a quick succession of incompatible images for “life.” First it is a candle, then a walking shadow, then a poor player, then a tale told by an idiot.
and the prefix is rather intriguing.
Publicly, Macbeth rejects the awareness he expressed in “to-morrow, and tomorrow” that life is like theater in its trivial failure to reach any true ending.
overliving is repressed rather than cured
Milton’s Samson Agonistes
A moving grave
…Milton, a poet haunted by the fear that time has gone wrong, and that life will either end too soon or go on too long.
The pain is such that
living death, enduring repetitive, pointless ime
However Milton avoided direct criticism of God, but in terms of how to interpret and respond to God’s apparently inconsistent dealings with Samson. God plays a big role here.
Samson Agonistes is a tragedy about the inaccessibility of any real drama
All passionate emotions must be eliminated, since they might imply criticism of God’s plan…Emotions are to be suppressed, because they imply doubt of God’’s purposes.
Milton’s Paradise Lost
The argument here is
living death may itself become a kind of freedom
Paradise Lost does not endrely repress the sense of overliving. Instead, the poem provides alternative, nonhuman ways of thinking about time — through history, or sub specie aeternatis.
Human history will inevitably seem slow to those who inhabit it, because after the Fall all human action will be merely a repetition of the actions of Paradise Lost.
From God’s epic perspective, the ultimate end of human history will not come until the Apocalypse, when time will give way to “ages of endless date”
Visibility
Tragic overliving is often associated with the desire to be covered or blind.
In all these cases, the desire to be hidden inevitably fails;
it defines Death only by his indefiniteness. This Death makes impossible even the ordinary usage of descriptive language, since he is a “shape” that cannot properly be “called” either “shape” or “substance,” and which has no “distinguishable” features at all.
Tragedy and Desire
Nine associates three elements with tragedy, the three
things “brought into the world” at the Fall: sin, death, and suffering.The same reproach is leveled repeatedly against Eve: she is “too desirous,” or loves life and pleasure too much: even her desire for chastity or death is merely the symptom of “life and pleasure overloved.” Eve’s solution to the problem of overliving is unacceptable because it implies “overloving,” or excessive love of the wrong things. Adam’s use of the word “overloved” answers his own previous use of the word “overlive” and explains why it was misguided. Eve imagines that postlapsarian life is overliving, but only because she “overloves” the wrong objects—life and pleasure rather than God.
Adam conflates three different accounts of how to make fire: by concentrated reflection; by the grinding “collision of two bodies”; and by using fires started by lighting.
The advice is Senecan: “We need to be warned and strengthened in both directions: both not to love life too much, and not to hate it too much”
The ultimate solution to Adam’s fear of living on in wretchedness, “miserable to have eternal being,” is not a promise of death, or even the various promises of ultimate revenge on Satan, but a promise of the possibility of inner transformation in the present.
Adam now realizes that death is only a “gate,” not an ending. Moreover, even understanding reaches no end. Each of Adam’s supposedly ultimate realizations turns out to need more and yet more supplementation. Michael urges Adam to “add” to the “sum / Of wisdom,” but the final score is never reached; the only end point is not in the outside world at all but in the “paradise within”
“wandering” may be as much a feature of tragedy as of these later genres, where the main focus is not on the end but the middle of the journey.
A quick summary:
Tragic overliving, for Adam and Eve as for Oedipus, becomes a kind of liberation. But in Paradise Lost, both the tragic sense of all life as living death and the possibility of indeterminacy, privacy, and freedom become entrely universal. Oedipus is an exceptional figure whose terrible story becomes representative of all our lives; but he escapes the fate of his children and of the rest of humanity, to repeat forever the pains of a life better left unlived. Adam and Eve are exceptional human beings only because they are the first. Their experiences will form the pattern for those of all their children, all the readers of the poem.