The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

After all, it was the Greeks, specifically Sophocles, I think, who said in Oedipus Tyranus, “Count no man lucky (or was it ‘happy’?) until he has  died.” That doesn’t mean that life is inherently awful and that no one will be happy until death, as some people think it does. It means that no one can tell what might happen tomorrow that might end what one thinks of as a lucky life. For Oedipus, life looked pretty good, after all. He had outwitted the Sphinx that had held the city of Thebes as hostage; as a result he had been made King of Thebes and given the previous king’s wife to be his wife. Yet his past was about to come crashing down upon him. He learned (in what actually is the first mystery work, with Oedipus as a detective of sorts) that the king he had succeeded was actually his own father, whom he had killed as a mean stranger who challenged him to a duel at a place where three roads met (always unlucky, since involving the number 3). Also, the queen who was now his wife was actually his mother, which meant his two daughters by her were bastards. And all this of course fulfilled an omen that had told him, as a boy, that some day he would kill his father and marry his mother. On the basis of that omen, he ran away from home, putting himself as far away as possible from the people he thought were his parents. How was he to know that he was the adopted son of the king and queen of Thebes, adopted by others after his birth parents exposed him outside the city after they were told in an omen that someday this child would be the death of them?

So, I should say that I have so far been lucky in my life, for which I am grateful to the Powers That Be. And I hope that I will continue to have such a thing to be grateful for in my future life. Yet  I may have already ruined things. After all, the last time I said, right here in my blog, that I was lucky to have had my knee surgery and yet wasn’t in much pain, the pain increased almost the next day, followed by infection. So I have to be very careful about hubris.