The Greek Way

So -- WHY do I believe in the Good even more, the more I am disillusioned and battered by observing (and sometimes experiencing) the Bad in the world?

I thought, last weekend, it should be the opposite -- logically, the more Bad you see, the more you would become cynical and lose your illusions and not expect any Good.

And I don't feel this way by choice. I find it just occurred.

I'm thinking I can look it up in "The Greek Way" by Edith Hamilton.
It's a book about Greek philosophy; Jacqueline Kennedy read and re-read it, and passed it on to Bobby Kennedy to read after the assassination of President Kennedy.

I'm thinking of a particular passage in "The Greek Way" -- will try to find it for you.

Okay -- found it right here, on-line.

(from The GreekWay, Edith Hamilton)
The special characteristic of the Greeks was their power to see the world clearly and at the same time as beautiful. ...
Tragedy was a Greek creation because in Greece thought was free. Men were thinking more and more deeply about human life, and beginning to perceive more and more clearly that it was bound up with evil and that injustice was of the nature of things. And then, one day, this knowledge of something irremediably wrong in the world came to a poet with his poet's power to see beauty in the truth of human life, and the first tragedy was written. ...

Tragedy belongs to the poets.
Only they have "trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struck one clear chord." None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry....
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That's the stuff.
Reading that made me think of blues music -- they sing about sad things, but you feel happy after you listen to it.
("Well I woke up this morning...
[dah -- nah-nah-nah-- NAH!]
"And I was feelin' so bad...
[nah nah-nah-nah -- NAH]

...