溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Can We Call a Life Happy Only When It Has Reached Its End?
If no splendid moment of a life can know what will follow, is it possible to call a life happy only after that life has wholly reached its end?
Being mortal, count no one happy until he has crossed the boundary of life free of pain.
The root of this maxim — "look to the end" — lies with the sage Solon, but Sophocles made it live as the fall of a single man on stage. The sudden overturning of the once-highest Oedipus into the abyss — the reversal of fortune (peripeteia) — became the heart of Greek tragedy's warning against human pride (hubris). Aristotle, in the "Poetics," analyzed just this reversal and recognition as the essence of tragedy, holding that pity and fear cut deepest when a great figure falls from the summit. Yet later philosophers sought another road — if happiness is so swayed by fortune's reversals, they would build within virtue a happiness nothing could overturn. Is happiness left to fortune to the very end, or can it be founded beyond fortune — this question rang most chillingly in a fall upon the stage.
For us who easily rejoice and grieve over today's success and failure, Solon's question — call no one happy before the end — makes us look, beyond the highs and lows of the moment, at the grain of a whole life.
Oedipus, revered as the highest and wisest king of Thebes, is revealed to be the cursed man who killed his father and wed his mother; he puts out his own eyes and collapses.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Oedipus, revered as the highest and wisest king of Thebes, is revealed to be the cursed man who killed his father and wed his mother; he puts out his own eyes and collapses. Having watched that terrible fall, the chorus sings at the last — being mortal, call no one happy until his final day is seen. For a life, even at its summit, no one knows how it may be overturned. I sense this question makes death the final light that illumines a whole life — only with an end does the shape of a life fully appear. This is not dread but a calm wisdom: do not rejoice or grieve over the success of the moment. I stand before this question too, thinking of how to draw the grain of a whole life rather than being shaken by today's highs and lows.
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