(no subject)

So I saw Les Troyens at the Met and it's now nearly two in the morning, so I'll see if I can write more about it later. It's a fricking gigantic grand opera, I have lots of opinions on it. But I wanted to throw this out there:

I have a bunch of papers I wrote in high school about Greek dramas like Oedipus, and my memory is that they all boiled down, ultimately, to "The message of this play is that you can't fuck with Fate and get away with it." And fine, I'm pretty sure that is the message of the plays. But I would have never written that paper in college, that's a completely high school attitude on my part, and it's now striking me as a great shame that I never read any Greek drama in college because I don't know how I would have broken apart the Oresteia from the position of relatively greater literary sophistication I held by the end of college.

Because ultimately here's my question: We don't believe in Fate today, mostly, and in particular my religion teaches that man was endowed by God with Free Will and the ability to make choices that have meaning. So what interest ought we to have in a play whose message is You can't fuck with Fate? Why would I want to see a play struggling with how much that sucks, when it's a sucky thing I don't believe in?

Anyway, Les Troyens is structured around the idea of prophecy and Fate in a pretty strong way. The first two acts are all about how Cassandra prophetically knows that Troy is going to be destroyed if the Trojans don't act smarter, and she's unable to do anything to change it. And that message from the first two acts drives the tragedy of the last act: Because Aeneas knows from Cassandra's example that you can't fuck with Fate, he leaves Dido 'to fulfill his destiny'.

And that's tragic and all, but again, in my world we don't believe in Fate. And it makes me just think of Aeneas as a giant dick.

Any thoughts on this? How do you deal with Greek drama and the Fates?