Dylan, Euripides And The Modern Mind

No one is free. Even the birds are chained to the sky.
- Bob Dylan

No one is truly free. They are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
- Euripides

Bob Dylan and Euripides. Both remarkable people. Euripides was the original "ahead of his time" kind of guy, a playwright. I didn't have too much to say about him until tonight, when I was watching Jeopardy, and they mentioned that Bob Dylan had won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his contributions to society. I thought that was funny because during the time in which Dylan was doing all that contributing to society - i.e. the sixties - I doubt you would find anyone over the age of thirty who thought that what he was doing was prize worthy much less contributing to the betterment of society. But now he gets a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Euripides was kind of the same way. Not so popular when he was alive; now we see him as being "enlightened". But I think that, like Dylan, Euripides wasn't so much enlightened as he was just honest. Sophocles said that while he portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed men as they really were. And - revolutionary - women too. Edith Hamilton referred to Euripides as having the "modern mind". Her description is applicable to any revolutionary...and any teenager worth their salt.

Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.

This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative... The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world.... The established order is always wrong to them.... They behold first and foremost that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of, in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away the veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things.... They will never accept defeat.
- "The Greek Way", pg. 206, 207

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
- Bob Dylan

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
- Euripides