CxD#221: Amazing Documentary & Reflections on Hecuba's fall from Grace
Often less is more, and so I present only morsels this week, because both or so resplendent with character.
This documentary features a character made entirely of kindness, charisma, benevolence, confidence, and a foxiness with his craft. I could not get enough of Mr. Bachmann and tried to soak in his way of being for the much too short running time of the film. Please, do yourselves the favor.
Side note: some teachers are angels on Earth. 😇
2. Martha Nussbaum: from the book Fragility :
Hecuba suffers a tremendous fall in grace—losing her husband and transition from queen to slave—and reacts with equanimity to her fate. But when she sees that her youngest child has been killed by her friend King Polymestor, to whom Hecuba had entrusted him, all equanimity is gone. She revenges herself on her friend by stabbing him in the eyes and killing his two children.
I think it’s pretty clear that this comes about not because she’s a bad person, but in a sense because she’s a good person, because she has had deep friendships on which she staked her moral life. And so what this play says that is so disturbing, is that the condition of being good is such that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something that you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstance, in circumstances for which you are not yourself to blame. And I think that says something very important about the condition of the ethical life. That it is based on a trust in the uncertain, a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.