Oedipus, the plague and ethical leadership

Introduction:

Human beings have always sought meaning to their existence. While their fellow-creatures
shared limitations related to their environment and conditions of life and death, human beings
were always reflecting about life, birth and death, in ways that no animal had ever thought. They
wanted to place their existence in what would somehow be a larger setting, a setting that goes
beyond the limits of nature, sickness, imperfections, death… The graves of Neanderthals found
by archeologists contained tools and bones and sacrificed animals, which shows that they may
have shared stories about some kind of beliefs in a future world, an afterlife that would culminate
the journey in this world and ‘make sense’ out of it. For Karen Armstrong, “the Neanderthals that
buried their companions with such care seem to have imagined that the visible, material world
was not the only reality” (Armstrong, 5).

It is no coincidence that the signs of belief in an afterlife were associated with graves. The
experience of death must have been traumatizing for humans, where the trauma would both be
caused by the loss of close ones and the fear of the similar fate awaiting. The image of
Gilgamesh hits us, lamenting over his dead friend Enkidu until a worm comes out the nose of the
corpse (X.ii.2-9). Yet, and while death and illness never fail to remind us of our finiteness, we
seem to always dream of an everlasting life, using our imagination to dream of new dimensions
where our happiness is not threatened by mortality and vulnerability. We do not just seek
immortality; we seek a happy life that never ends. But where does happiness lie, and how to find
it?

For Aristotle, eudaimonia, or the ultimate happiness, is found when we live our nature,
practicing the good and living the virtue that makes us accomplish our humanity. Eudaimonia is
both reached by knowing the good and doing the good (Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b 10-20). Yet
the good seems to be unseen to the eyes of the flesh, which creates a struggle within the human
being, seeking the truth about the good and fighting to find the key to happiness. But happiness
cannot be the result of a mathematical formula, calculated through statistics and lab experiments.
Happiness is a state of mind that can be understood through experience. This is where Aristotle
invites us to find out about virtue – the key to happiness – in the virtuous person. That man of
virtue would be the leader who enlightens us with a fire stolen from the gods, just like
Prometheus. But where to find that leader, and how does that person emerge?

Human history teaches us that heroes emerged in times of crisis. Our collective unconscious
is full of images of heroes who led us to better places, saving us from the crisis of our brokenness
and finiteness. Moses, William Wallace, Gandhi, and many others, all discovered their call when
oppression and exploitation were taking place. They found themselves transcending their human
condition, guided by some higher spirit that stood up against the political and religious tyrants of
their time. While these heroes did provide (or at least tried to) solutions to emergent problems,
what they really did was setting an example for us. A hero always attracts our desire to
perfection, instigates our mimetic instinct, and relights in us a fire that would have faded in the
routine of everyday life. We sometimes tell fictive stories about these heroes, but this is a natural
and healthy phenomenon. Heroes revive in us the faculty of imagination, which is our faculty to
build new worlds, tell stories that are not always historically accurate, stories that would be
unexperienced on the ‘physical’ level of our lives.

The same process took place in ancient myths, where humans used imagination to tell stories
about the leadership that leads to a better life. Imagination, as Bachelard puts it, is the power we
have as humans to destroy the images of our physically experienced reality. It is the power to
“deform the images given by perception, mostly the faculty to free us from primary images, (the
faculty) to change the images” (Bachelard, 7). Imagination is then the human power to break free
from the limitedness of the visible world, creating winds that help humans ascend into a world of
possibilities, a world of inexhaustible beauty, one that answers the desire to always go beyond.

When facing a crisis, we feel unease to say the least, but that same unease is a reminder of
something beyond. It is precisely because this beyond is constitutive of our very nature that we
feel disturbed by the limitation the crisis presents. The tension that rises between what is in our
actuality and what we see as potentiality (through our dreams) always found its expression in
human myths, which became fascinating stories that guide us both collectively and
unconsciously to the way things are supposed to be. That is why this paper presents an invitation
to explore ethical leadership through myths. The ethical leadership that I propose to find is a sort
of self-leadership that can exist in everyone of us, like a Mozart sleeping in us and waiting to be
awakened. It needs to awake by the way of the beautiful, where we do not only analyze the truth
with our minds, but also dream of it with our hearts.

Ethical value of Myths:

Muthos is a Greek word that designates a “word” or story, transmitted across generations.
It always tells a sacred story, reporting an event that took place at a primordial time, the time of
beginnings, where the foundation of things gives meaning to existence.

Every culture has a founding myth, and with it an invitation to make the world a better
place. The myth reports stories of origins that explain existence, and while existence is not free
from suffering, mythology explains suffering by placing it in the context of an original fall, a
crime that distorted the original harmony which prevailed in the mythical primordial time. The
struggles figured in myths explain our human condition and give access to some “hierophany”,
to use Eliade’s term, which is the appearance of the sacred in the profane life. That hierophany is
a “breakthrough of the sacred into the world” (Eliade, 6), one that brings back the primordial
value of humans into the ‘profane’ everyday life. For Bachelard, “every myth is condensed
human drama” (Diel, viii). It reveals the hidden order of reality, which is not less real than the
one we experience in our rational dimension.

The philosophy of the 19th century underestimated the value of myths, considering that
they are the product of primitive societies that lacked science. Muthos was considered as
something that gives nothing new (or even useful) to logos. But the come-back of symbolism,
through famous thinkers like Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Mircea Eliade, and many others,
reinstituted the value of myths, and while mythical thought preceded rational thought, it stopped
being considered as the least important. At the contrary, mythical thought was the most natural
way of thinking, inherent to human nature. Myths reveal the structure of human mind, the way
we see the world, representing it with more colorful images than the conceptual ideas. It is based
on symbols that tell the story of the world, not as it started, but as it is, explaining its value and
its destiny, showing its meaning.

The word meaning, in Germanic languages, is sinn, which signifies purpose, direction,
and meaning. In this context, myths become stories that reveal the value and direction of human
existence. Through the primordial time of the myth, the story sends a message on how things
ought to be for humans to fulfill their destiny and reach their happy life. A myth, in that sense,
becomes a true story reporting our human reality, and guiding us to see in different ways, to
understand how to act, and decide on the right way. Myths thus become an invitation to restore
the primordial times, the ones that reveal human nature, or to redeem initial sins, ones that are
the reason of struggles in our world. But how can we decode a myth, and what are we called to
understand by it? What does it call us to accomplish, and which nature does it reveal to us?

Trying to answer these questions, the best possible way is to follow a myth, and try to
understand the message it holds. In this project, choosing the myth of Oedipus seems to be the
most obvious choice in our times.

Of all Greek mythology, the story of Oedipus is the most famous. Aristotle considered it
the supreme example of tragic drama and largely modeled his theory of tragedy on it (Botton,
20). Since the 19th century, this myth became subject to numerous and different interpretations; it
got even more famous through Freud’s well-known “Oedipus complex”, designing the
instinctive love of a boy to his mother, bringing rivalry between the boy and his father.

The story starts with the crisis of an epidemy, a plague hitting the city of Thebes. The
reason of the epidemy will soon show to be a hideous crime, someone who murdered the king,
disturbed the order of things, and is still amongst the Thebans. Seeking the identity of this
“criminal” became an invitation to go back to the origin of things, to the original quest of
Oedipus who was seeking his identity and escaping his supposedly inevitable and abominable
fate. He will find in all this an opportunity to redeem a generational mistake, and to restore a
state of continuous hierophany, by becoming a blessing that brings victory to the city where he
would be buried.

Oedipus: The main story

Oedipus Rex starts with Thebes being struck by a plague, and the people of the city
asking Oedipus, their king, to deliver them from its horrors. Creon, brother of Jocasta, Oedipus’
queen, comes back from the oracle of Apollo and discloses that the plague was punishment for
the murder of Laius, Oedipus’ predecessor to whom Jocasta had been a wife. For the plague to
be lifted, the people of Thebes would have to discover the murderer and punish him. Justice
needs to take place for harmony to come back to nature. Evil needs to be punished so that good
would be restored. Oedipus, as the leader of Thebes, assumes his responsibility to investigate
into the matter. He summons upon Tiresias, the ancient blind seer of Thebes, who advises
Oedipus not to dig for the truth, for it would bring more harm than harmony. A typical reaction
of tired humans who feel that the fight for the truth is not worth the suffering that one endures
when finding it, and thus surrender to the fatality of fate. Oedipus, the one with the swollen feet,
is supposed to be tired enough from his journey and skip this fight for the sake of Thebes. But his
moral responsibility as a king made him insist on Tiresias to know the truth, and eventually finds
out that he was the killer of Laius, who turns out to be his real father.

Oedipus parents had decided to get rid of him, few days after his birth, because of a
prophecy predicting that the child would kill his father and get married to his mother. The
parents give the child to a herdsman who had the task to kill Oedipus but instead, gives the child
to another shepherd. The latter, in his own turn, takes the child to the childless royal couple,
Polybos and Merope, king and queen of Corinth. The young Oedipus will learn from the Oracle
of Delphi that he has the horrible destiny of killing his father and getting married to his mother,
which leads him to escape Corinth, going as far as possible from Polybos and Merope. Tired and
angry, he unknowingly fulfills the very same destiny that he wanted to escape. He meets a men
with his staff, riding a chariot which obstructs Oedipus’ way. The men order him in a rude way
to move aside, which drives Oedipus angry. He attacks them and manages to kill them with only
one soldier escaping.

Reaching the city of Thebes, Oedipus finds it in despair from being under the mercy of
the Sphinx, a despotic monster who terrorized the people of Thebes. The monster offers a riddle
to Oedipus, which the latter solves, making the monster commit suicide and bringing freedom
back to Thebes. He will be rewarded by becoming king of Thebes, marrying its widowed queen,
Jocasta.
Some interpreted the myth as a cosmic description, where the day kills the night, while it
comes from it. This way, Oedipus would be killing Laius, his father, though the latter was at his
origins (Decharme, 582). The crime against the origin would be taken later by Freud, who found
in the myth an explanation of the crisis of the relationship between the son and the father. The
first would desire the mother, and thus would try to eliminate the father, which becomes his
rival. Of course, in the play of Oedipus, the latter unknowingly killed his father after what would
be equivalent to a right-of-way dispute between two drivers. But a line in the play draws
attention to the child’s desire for his mother: “And as for this marriage with your mother — have
no fear. Many a man before you, in his dreams, has shared his mother’s bed” (Oedipus Rex, l.
1013). In Freud’s version of what will be known as the ‘Oedipus complex’, the child’s desire,
directed towards possessing the mother, creates rivalry between the son and the father. This
Freudian interpretation made the myth of Oedipus even more famous than it was. The author of
Totem and Taboo had caught the importance of this myth, and unveiled in it a ‘foundational
crime’, one that will be further studied by René Girard.

Oedipus as the scapegoat:

For Girard, the myth of Oedipus is a demonstration of the scapegoat, where the social crisis
would find a victim to defuse the dangers of an explosion (Girard 77.79). Society, for him,
reaches several crises due to the tendency to eliminate differences and ranks. It all starts with the
main human desire, which is the mimetic desire. This desire to imitate others is at the roots of
human development, where humans learn to smile, walk, talk, eat…all through imitation. This
imitation goes a step further to become at the roots of trends, fashion and social habits. Rich
people, for example, would become the target of imitation for poor people, who would try to
follow the same lifestyle, wear the same cloth brands, and go to the same places for vacation that
rich people go to. Once commercialism manages to make these things affordable for the poor,
rich people would find themselves losing some of their privileged image, their uniqueness, and
thus find themselves looking for more. The more imitation takes place, the higher the level of
fear goes, fear of losing uniqueness, identity, order of things…

This creates a social crisis that could take the form of economic disaster; the crisis could
also take the shape of a natural disaster, an epidemy, coming from excess in rivalry and abuse of
nature’s resources. Fear creates a situation where all are found to be against all, and each for
his/her own sake. Disorder prevails and risks to dismantle the whole society, which then finds a
way out by throwing the guilt on a singular victim. Girard notices that any community in a state
of violence, or suffering from some overwhelming catastrophe, seeks “immediate and violent
cure for the onslaught of unbearable violence and [its members] strive desperately to convince
themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can be easily disposed of ”
(Girard, 80). What was “all against all” turns into “all against one”, and that one would be the
scapegoat. In our case, Oedipus would become the scapegoat of Thebes, holding on him the
crisis of the city, taking the punishment by stabbing his own eyes and sending himself into exile.

But even Girard, with his fascinating explanation of the myth and of the human
phenomenon of violence, did not pay attention to the origins of Oedipus anger, which led him to
unknowingly kill his father. It is in the story of Laius, not figuring in Sophocles’ trilogy, that the
mystery of an ‘original sin’ gets revealed, the sin that led to the unbalanced decisions of the one
with the ‘swollen feet’ (Oedipus).

Laius, king of the city of Thebes, was the son of Labdacus. After the death of his father,
he was protected and raised in the Peloponnesus. Laius fell in love with Pelops’ son, Chrysippus,
whom he abducted and raped while teaching him how to drive a chariot. As a result of this crime,
a curse was thrown on Laius, where his firstborn son would kill him. Here is a very important
detail in the story of Oedipus Rex: the death of Laius is the fruit of his own unbalanced love, the
improper desire which leads to death. Once we shed the light on this detail, we understand why
Oedipus, the one with the swollen feet, was not walking steadily. His ankles were pierced and
pinned together, an act by which the father wanted to make sure that the ghost of the killed child
would not be able to haunt him. Oedipus had held in him the traces of his father’s sin. And as the
symbolic fruit of the father’s ill-directed love, his firstborn, Oedipus, would bring death to Laius.
The latter, afraid of his fate, abstained from sleeping with his wife, Jocasta. But one day she
would get him drunk and conceive a child. Here is another unbalanced desire, a drunk man
approaching a woman with no real love involved. Even more, Sophocles slips a line in the play,
where the herdsman is answering Oedipus questions about his origins. It was this herdsman who
took Oedipus the child from the palace to leave him to death, so Oedipus asks him if the child
(himself) was Laius’ son or that of a slave, and the answer was: “ Know then the child was by
repute his own, But she (Jocasta, Oedipus wife and mother) within, thy consort best could tell.”
What a fate of the man who holds within him the sin of his parents!

Oedipus represents the human being, seeking his origins, not even sure of his own
parents, confused in the relationship with his creator, traumatized at his childhood, pierced in the
same feet that were meant to help him walk steadily in life. The real trauma originated in the fear
of Oedipus parents who are holding him responsible for their own sins of unbalanced love. It is
in these details, neglected by the many interpreters of the myth, that we manage to understand
how Oedipus was really the scapegoat, the innocent victim who held the sins of his predecessors.
Once we read the myth this way, what Freud calls the Oedipus complex might as well be called
the Laius complex, which is the father’s fear of being replaced by his son through imitation.
Wasn’t this fear of being replaced that led Herod the king to order the massacre of the children of
Bethlehem? And isn’t this fear similar to the fear of scarcity of resources, where the ego refuses
to lose its statue as owner of wealth, and accepts the elimination of others in order to preserve its
power?

It is no coincidence that the myth of Oedipus was amongst the most interpreted myths in
Greek mythology. Sophocles did write in there a story of human beings, their struggles with
violence, disasters, suffering from sins that are transmitted from generation to generation. But
suffering is not the end of the story, and the fate of humans is not limited to suffering and death.
Sophocles trilogy continues to tell the story of “Oedipus at Colonus”, where a transformation of
pain would take place. But before explaining what happens in Colonus, we need to see what
happens at the end of Oedipus Rex.

When Oedipus realizes that he was the murderer of Laius, he curses his life and the
herdsman who saved him, and going into the room where his mother and wife hanged herself, he
reaches out to her golden pins, the ones that held her robe, and uses them to stab his own eyes.
He could not bear to see the world, he said. But the same pins used to veil the identity of his
mother, and then used to veil his own sight of the world, will be unveiling to him a whole new
dimension of reality. The blind Oedipus will be able to see better and will be guided to Colonus
by his compassionate daughter, Antigone.

Colonus and the second stage of life

In the opening scene of “Oedipus at Colonus”, the second in Sophocles’ trilogy, we see
Oedipus trespassing holy ground, an act that will require prayer or libation. Oedipus accepts to
make the atonement for his sin of trespassing, but we can notice that something has changed in
him: He is not sorry for trespassing the holy ground; he feels he belongs to the land of the gods.
Somehow, and after taking responsibility for his mistake in Oedipus Rex, he seems to be freed
from guilt. This part of the story is another stage of life, another episode in the quest for identity,
where Oedipus discovers that he belongs to the world of gods. Reaching this stage of life had a
very expensive price, which started with having feet pierced, and reached having eyes pierced.

Once the price has been paid, piety and pride somehow started to coincide in the person
of Oedipus. He was so close to the accomplishment of the Socratic call of knowing oneself, so
close to the answers that are coming from within, from the depth of his humanity. Yet, as deep
and clear as these answers were, they would not have been possible without the guidance of a
compassionate daughter/sister, a loving attraction that guided Oedipus to his real fate. Theseus,
king of Colonus, was first reluctant to receive Oedipus, the cursed man. However, he will
sympathize with Oedipus, especially that he knew of a prophecy saying that this same cursed
man will become a blessing for the place of his burial. Theseus accepts to receive Oedipus, and
then helps him meet his other daughter, Ismene. At the end of the story, the two daughters will
accompany Oedipus to his grave, dressing him in white linen, and leaving him with Theseus,
supposed to be the only one to know where Oedipus grave would be. But something mysterious
happens, a light almost blinds Theseus, who hide his eyes and only uncovers them to find that
Oedipus disappeared, almost rising to heaven. The place becomes a blessing to Colonus, which
will win the battle against Thebes, according to the old prophecies.

Prior to his ‘assumption’ to heaven, Oedipus had met one of his two sons who were
fighting each other over the rule of Thebes. Polynices was asking for Oedipus to bless him and
grant him the right of the successor, but the father refused to interfere into the quarrel of his two
sons. He disconnected from the legacy of violence; he refused to transmit the hurt that he
suffered throughout his life to the coming generation; he would rather transform that hurt: “there
is no room for grieving here— it might bring down the anger of the gods” (Oedipus at Colonus,
1970-1974). The only grieving would come from cursing his own son for refusing to stop
fighting with his brother, a curse where Sophocles makes sure that the compassion of readers
goes to the one cursing rather than the one cursed, because Oedipus’ intention was to make sure
that his descendance gets a better destiny. His daughters will get to witness this better destiny,
seeing the fulfillment of Oedipus purpose.

This myth could serve as a blueprint for the way one can transform the pain in life.
Suffering is inevitable, and as Richard Rohr brilliantly puts it: “If we do not transform our pain,
we will most surely transmit it” (Rohr, 2016). Societies face different crisis, whether economic,
social political, or natural disasters, epidemic plagues that present themselves as obstacles where
fear prevails and uncertainty rules. In these times, people often turn to anger, which is the most
instinctive way our brain tries to control pain. We blame each other, our ancestors, our fellow
humans, God, nature, we could even blame ourselves and lament about our irreversible
situation… Blame is often accompanied by self-pity, where we lament about our situation and
consider that we cannot do anything to change it. Oedipus offers an approach to a responsible
leadership that transforms the pain and uses crisis as an opportunity to move to higher stage of
being, a second stage of life, where leadership radiates.

Ethical Leadership:

An old Lebanese proverb says that in tough times of crisis, real men emerge. All human
drama shows challenges that some people manage to turn into opportunities to go beyond the
limits and explore new horizons. But what are the conditions for these real leaders to emerge?
How can disasters that threaten our very existence bring out the best in us, and even in the
society around us? What are the virtues that need to be cultivated in us to transform our reality of
suffering into another one that goes from glory to glory? Of the many characteristics of a good
leader, I will restrain myself to five virtues: Curiosity, courage, humility, openness and clarity.

For Aristotle, philosophy begins with wonder. While the author of Nicomachean did not
place curiosity in his list of virtues, he placed a very important value on wonder. Only wonder
can guide us to the truth. Oedipus’ wonder guided him on a journey to discover his identity, his
origins and his destiny. When crisis hit, anger and resentment can only make things worse; the
only thing that can save us from the prison of our limitedness is to be curious, looking for
answers. Like an owl stays awake when everybody sleeps, ethical leaders find in crises
opportunities to see when everyone seems to be busy staying alive. But where do we need to
look, and what would we be looking for? It turns out that we need a lot of courage to ask
ourselves the questions that lead the way.

Courage is the virtue of the soul that is not afraid of making decisions once their utility is
wisely assessed. Of all tough decisions, to investigate oneself seems to be the hardest. The
disposition to look inside us is a decision to delve into the abyss of the unknown. A lot of tension
is to be discovered, a lot of inner conflicts. Hesitations, contradictory desires, love and hatred…
all conflictual emotions can be found inside of our soul, which makes it very hard for us to
journey inside. This is the case of patients who seek therapy but start resisting when discovering
themselves. It is the Tiresias who, though wise and experienced, advises us not to face the truth.
It would cost us a lot of pain, which is naturally rejected by our reward-seeking brains. More in
more in our society, we expect a pain-free life and refuse to suffer. Pharmaceutical drugs have
been making skyrocket profits since the 1970s, when psychiatrists started substituting therapeutic
talk with antidepressant and anxiolytic pills. Courage is determinism to find the truth; it is that
stubbornness of Jacob, not letting go until he would be blessed by that stranger struggling with
him all night until the sun rises (Ge. 32: 22-32). But that blessing must come from another, and
must be requested by the self, which appeals to the value of humility.

Self-knowledge is also about discovering our limitations. I know that I know nothing,
says the great Socrates. When looking into the depth of our being, and with all the inexhaustible
beauty that we find, we still find an emptiness, a void calling for another person to fill it. We are
relational beings, born as the fruit of a relationship that could be full of joy or sadness, and
probably both. We learn how to smile, eat, walk and talk through relationships. Humility is this
acknowledgement that we are not self-sufficient and that we need each other to fulfill our
destiny. When we acknowledge our limitedness, another gift of humility shines in us, which is
accountability. We stop feeling afraid of admitting our mistakes, taking responsibility for our
actions. Here is Oedipus, our hero, embracing the consequences of his previous actions, even
when he did them out of ignorance. Humility and courage meet, and the result is salvation.
Humility also steers in us compassion for others, where we feel their pain and understand their
limitedness. We would then be moved by a desire to help them, share their pain and assist them
in getting over it. It is this compassion that moved Oedipus to help the Thebans, first saving them
from the Sphinx, and later from the plague. But a pitfall lies on the way, courage might be mixed
with the pride of an intellect who falls for the illusion of control. Our Oedipus fought the Sphinx
with his mind; he used his power of rationalization, whereas the real answer would lie in the
heart, in the power of spiritualization 1. Tension would then become an opportunity for openness
to some higher meaning, a spiritual source that invites us to always go beyond.

Openness is the virtue that naturally comes out of humility. A good leader is open to
others, receiving from them and giving them. Openness is also about accepting to wait in silence
for something to be received. It is about knowing that all the answers do not only lie within us,
not even within the human system. Our finiteness calls for a transcendence that shows in us but
does not originate in us. My kingdom is not from this world, said Jesus to Pilate, but it is called
to come into this world, thorough the prayer taught by the great Rabbi Yeshua ben Yossef.
Without this openness to a higher source, everything in the world risks collapsing. The void in us
cannot be filled by others because they cannot be a source of security for us. Only a
transcendence, a higher power that completes our being, can fill the gaps of our infinite non-
being and give us the peace that our hearts are longing for. The mimetic crisis becomes an
invitation to imitate someone from elsewhere, the one who is not afraid of losing identity if
imitated, the one that IS perfect and invites us to imitate perfection. Spiritualization, which is
according to Victor Frankl, “the continuous quest to go beyond” is the culminating point of the
life of Oedipus. The dream of perfection is what can provide us with the virtue of clarity.

Clarity is in the goal, the purpose of our life. But since we are always on a journey to
discover ourselves, can we talk of clarity? Do we ever know the ultimate purpose? The
revelation of John speaks of a hidden name, prepared for the ones who accomplish victory on a
white stone, a name which no one knows but he that receives it. 2 Our true nature is hidden to us,
and will always be revealed after the struggle, just like Jacob found his name, “Israel”, after the
struggle. He became the one who struggled with God and survived, the biblical Prometheus who
stole the fire from the gods and brought it to earth with its warmth and clarity.

1
Paul Diel considers that Oedipus solving the riddle of the Sphinx is a symbol of approaching the mystery of life
with the power of the mind, which might seem to succeed, but eventually proves its limitations. Only the faculty of
spiritualization can save humans by transcending nature into a mystical communication with the whole (Diel, 126-
127)

2
“and I will give to him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows but he
that receives “, Revelation 2:17.
When a ship is about to drown, old navigators had a simple rule: Throw everything out,
keep only the essential. In human life, plagues are invitation to do the same. Yet the essential is
invisible to the eyes, only with the heart can someone see rightly (Saint-Exupery, 53). When
noise is causing too many distractions, the silence of a dark night becomes an invitation to see.
Maybe mythological events could help us see clearly and lead others into clear vision.
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