"The soul is commonly supposed to escape by the natural openings of the body, especially the mouth and nostrils." (The Golden Bough, 208)

We have all been assigned our one-minute Ovid story. I have "Orpheus and Eurydice", which fills me with excitement and apprehension, as we are to know more about the story given us than any one else does.

We than moved into the very rosy mythological sphere of suffering and theodicy and the battle to be had therein. We have already assigned to learn about the existential dimensions of myth by having a bad day. I admit that I wasn't aware that it was Nietzsche who said "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Though there really is something to be said here about tone--having "me" instead of "you" changes this from one of those moralistic pronouncements that are easy to dispense but less so to ingest in life to a personal state of resolution in the face of horrible suffering. It seems to Kari that there is a difference, but that could just be Kari.

Because when we reach the question of "what's the worst that can possibly be imagined?" in Ovid(and the answer turns out to the story of Tereus Procne and Philomela), we end up wondering: is it somehow a pathetic little snide slap in the face to try and draw morals about how "everything's for the best in the best of all possible world's" and "oh, you can learn from this" from things that are this terrible? Maybe I'm just taking it too much to heart, and that the real needful thing is to confront the specter of horrific suffering in stories; the telling of stories has the potential of making us better morally, not by having tidy "morals" but in a deeper more complex double-edged sword kind of way. Or perhaps, as the King in The Odyssey puts it: "we suffer so that the poets will have something to write about."

"Paterfamilias" refers to the male head of a family; on the obverse, the "materfamilias" is the female head of a family.