Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

The Ancient Greek tragic sense of life is revealed in all manner of ways, perhaps none more powerful than the ubiquitous worship of the adolescent male.  A youth in the flower of his adolescence is all the more tragic for being that glorious moment before the body begins its long, sad decline into old age and death.  Women whose chemistry give them the magical capacity of renewal through reproducing themselves from within their own bodies do not face the fact of physical extinction as males must.  At least this seems to be the truth of the ancient Greek male sense of things.  Coupled with this is the notorious socially approved custom of males in their twenties and thirties taking late adolescent boys as lovers.  Setting aside the fact that unmarried males would have little access to women for sexual purposes, indeed for much of any contact, and that women were so little valued that contact with them would not have been all that pleasing, one might argue that for males confronting their mortality as they sensed the inevitable fading of their powers, a powerful physical and emotional involvement with a beautiful youth was a powerful way to experience by proxy the splendor and vitality of masculine youth.  I was reminded of this on a recent evening whilst visiting friends whose seventeen year old son joined us for a few moments.   This was a lad whom I have known since he was a toddler, who more recently dazzled me as he shown out in all the magical beauty of a fifteen year old,  His perfectly shaped face had the slight fullness of the remains of baby fat, his skin glowed with the pink of health, his features were even and small, still slightly unformed, giving his overall physiognomy a magnificent grace, punctuated by roseate full lips, shining sparkling eyes surrounded with long full curving lashes.  In short, he was luscious, and his appearance was of a piece with his charming, warm, inviting personality.  When I now beheld him, he bounded forth a full foot taller than myself, grasped me in a powerful embrace, and looked at me from a face that had grown leaner, stronger, and more bony, punctuated by a nose grown longer, more pointed and assertive.  He had commenced to become a man, had shed that roseate complexion for whiter tones, had developed lips thinner and more commanding, eyes still warm and friendly but bereft of their shining.  In sum he had surrendered to the mortality that we all carry within us, at least I believe the ancient Greeks would have quickly sensed this, attuned as they were to the melancholy fact of the death of beauty.