Is tragedy dead?”
This is what I asked Mrs. Hartman at the end of it all, when I was still obsessed with every fatal flaw but my own.
She didn’t ask why I needed to know. Instead she asked me to define tragedy for her. I told her this was impossible: tragedy was a subphilosophy, something to be felt, not defined.
She shook her head. “Majestic sadness,” she told me. “That’s tragedy.”
I thought about that night, standing side by side with Evan and Amir in those waning moments before the policemen, the fire trucks, the body count. I thought about the look on Evan’s soot-washed face. “I wonder if Noah is seeing this,” he had said, his voice soft, sad. After everything that had happened our senior year, it was the way he said this that made me cry. If that was not majestic sadness, I decided, nothing was.
“Well, Mr. Eden?” She blinked at me. “Did it die with the Greeks?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”