Simon’s philosophical work Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us is a book form of years of educating students about Greek thought and how it informs western thinking from when the plays were first invented to now.

Simon Critchley writes philosophy like it’s a casual act. He somehow finds the way to make the high tower ideas of texts seem relatable to the everyman. I read this book during the summer of 2025 while going through a divorce, running a business, raising sons, and traveling around in Germany with family. It came at a time when I myself felt like I was not only experiencing personal tragedies to my own ideas of where my life was going but it seemed like a daily occurrence if you looked anywhere online as well.

I was a philosophy minor in college and often return to thinkers and texts like a lost lover looking for warm arms to hold me. The recommendation that drew me to this book after reading his book on Mysticism was “Pay attention and you can reinvent your life” by The New Yorker. It’s written on the books cover under the title. Seemed too obvious.

A far too simple explanation of this book’s premise is that tragedy is “disorientation” that reorients one to life as what it is. Tragedy itself is disorienting and can spin one out of context. You can be forced into finding your way again which is the work after tragedy. Life has a way of going about on its own. No matter how much habit, practice, creation, will, or even discipline, life has a way of reorienting or disorienting you to the realities of what a day presents.

Here are some examples of what I wrote in the margins of the book:

“Tragedy can be transitory - a new beginning”

“Share what you know of the past.”

“How can one stay in the traditional ways of thinking when the tragedies that befall them point to a lack of reasoning?”

“Hero = Villain - same coin.”

“We are all of us a part of this machine and must acknowledge our place for there to be any foundation that could lead to peace.”

“Tragedy is a lie revealing the Truth.”

Those were only from the first four chapters. The premise of this book is taking the idea of tragedy in literary form and how the Greeks hold a mirror up to us, “in which we see all the dissolution and illusion of our lives but also the terrifying beauty and intensity of existence.”

Tragedy can expose the reality of being alive because it shows us that we can be snuffed out, exposed, or even made weak by the realities of living in a world that regularly seems indifferent to our desires.

This book came at a time when most of our world seems thrown into division, despondency, and even outright pathological insanity. I regularly hold an optimistic and even defiant hope that we bend towards justice, but even my somewhat stoic, mystical worldview has fallen victim to the nonsensical happenings of the age we exist in.I’ve had to deal with the shortcomings of a worldview that can’t seem to make sense of so much that makes so little sense.

Simon takes a course he has taught in universities for years and makes it somewhat approachable to those who are willing to face the tragedies they witness on a day-to-day basis. We all have seen them. From our social media feeds to our personal lives. From the sprawl of nihilism to how democracy seems to mean nothing at all anymore. It’s very easy to think, feel, and even experience that a lot of this seems pointless.

However, the book never lets up in its undying turn of possibilities. Even in plays that are as ancient as Plato, Greek thought, and the birth of tragedy as a written or played out medium. Western thought has absolutely let the world down yet, when have humans not come short? This isn’t some review of a book that signals that there is some larger entity that is yet still guiding it all - it’s more of an acknowledgement that somehow life has the ability to find a way. Even when we are in our darkest moments, we can actually look at whatever experience that is befalling us and decide what to do with it.

Even if you or I are heartbroken beyond measure, we can still choose to act with grace or understanding or even goodness because the tragedy of the event itself does not have to define us.

I don’t know how to recommend this book outside of sharing a journal entry while I was on a beach in Germany because Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us was at the top of my mind while I was there:

6/20/25 - “The Beach” I just did a 1 ½ front flip for the first time in over 2 years into a river in Germany. Dillon and his friends vaulted me in the air at a nude-friendly beach in Berlin, Germany. I interviewed Brendon this morning while my siblings went to a memorial for the Holocaust. I’ve seen enough of that devastation. I see it daily in Gaza. The world has been a witness to it for over a year. How does one keep living and making things in the face of so much heartache? How can we all see blown-up kids in between ads on social media? I never imagined I would be here - finishing a book about tragedy at the beach and fully alive while also going through a divorce. Life has a way of surprising us even in the times of great joy and great heartache. Life’s experiences of joy and sorrow are like a pretzel. Never just one thing. I’m smoking a cig while writing - I haven’t done this exactly since my late 20s. We got to go backstage at the Palask, which is a world-renowned theatre where my brother Dillon has been performing for the last two years. This is all a gift. I am happy and melancholy and joyous while carrying the weight of sorrow. Maybe this is the point ultimately. To be alive and aware. To be alive while also fully sad with the realities of what it means to be human in a complex, unjust and inhuman world that puts money above all. Tragedy exposes our humanness, and we all are that at the end of the day.

The whole idea of Time2LiveAgain is to put into practice that which needs to happen to be fully alive. We are striving to shine a little brighter, to offer alternatives to the gloom, the nihilism, and the despondency that creeps in. This book helped me do just that and if you have the patience, it will reward you too.

-Caton Vance

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