HARPER. (To audience.) This has been a course on tragedy. That is what this course is supposed to be about. (Pause.) First, let me remind you what tragedy is not. Tragedy has nothing to do with choice. If you can choose, it is not tragic. There are some people who think that our arms race with the Russians is tragic. It is not. It is not, because we have the choice, they have the choice, to say No, to stop, to disarm, to embrace each other in the name of peace at any time. So it is not tragic. It is stupid, yes. It is insane, it is suicidal, it is pathetic, but it is not - repeat Not - tragic, in the true Greek sense of the word. (Pause.) Tragedy occurs when you cannot choose, when you have no choice at all. This is hard for Americans to understand. Because most of us are free, or think we are. Nowhere else in the world, and never before in hisotry, have so many people been so free to choose so many destinies. Perhaps, because of this freedom, it is impossible for us to sense what the Greeks called tragedy. We have no oracles, no gods, no real sense of ultimate authority to insist that if we do one thing, another will inevitably follow. We are free. (Pause.) On the other hand, there might come a time to some of us, to one or two, (He glances at Dave.) when we get an inkling, a glimmer, a faint shadow of a shadow of what it might have been like fo rthe Greeks when they sat in a thatre and saw the universe close in on a man, or woman, because of some flaw, some excess, some overshooting of the mark ... (Pause.) Then the net tightens, and as he struggles, tightens further, until he is crushed by forces total and absurd. (Pause.) Then we might be touching the outer borders of tragedy, as the Greeks once knew it. (Pause. He takes up his book of Antigone.) But I've just discovered something else about tragedy. Something I thought I knew, but didn't understand till now. And that is what the tragic heroes do after the net has closed around them. What they do, even in the teeth of disaster, is accept responsibility, assert their own destiny, and mete out proudly their own punishments. This is what Oedipus does when he puts out his eyes. This is what Antigone does, when she hangs herself. And this is what Creon does, at the end of the same play. He has lost his wife, his children, all he holds dear. And he realizes why: that in his commitment to abstract and dehumanizing laws, he has neglected the very heart of life. And so he banishes himself from his own city. His Polis. He goes. He disappears. he leaves the stage, forever doomed now to wander far from the only community he knows, self-exiled and alone. (Pause.) I'll expect all papers under my door by five o'clock this evening. You may retrieve them, graded and with appropriate comments, from the Departmental office next Monday. Enjoy your summer. Read good books. Go to good plays. Think of the Greeks. Thank you and goodbye.