“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
(Aeschylus, from the play Agamemnon)
After the assassination of his brother in Dallas in November 1963, Robert Francis Kennedy went through a period of deep depression and deep introspection. Before the assassination, Kennedy had a reputation for being a somewhat ruthless man of action. The shooting on that fateful day in Dallas, led Kennedy to question many things about his life and the world around him. So it was that he turned to the writings of many people, one of whom was the Ancient Greek playwright and poet, Aeschlyus.
And it was the lines above, which Kennedy used in his famous extemporaneous speech on 4 April 1968 in Indianapolis to approximately 2500 people during a campaign stop in the US General Election primary campaign. In the state of Indiana, he had to break the appalling news to a mostly black audience that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis that same evening.
It was without doubt one of the greatest unscripted speeches that has ever been filmed and possibly one of the greatest ever made. Kennedy talked with the crowd about hatred and how as a country the USA had to move on from it and find a better path, while using these amazing lines from Aeschylus to illustrate his point.
And that night Indianapolis was one of the few cities in the USA to stay calm and untroubled by rioting.
Aeschylus for today
If the plays and poetry of Aeschylus were relevant in 1968, then they are surely just as relevant for us today. Must we always have to learn through suffering and are we condemned to make the same mistakes and suffer over and over again? We have seen only too clearly where division and hatred can get us as a society, in the 1930s in Germany, in Rwanda in 1994, in Bosnia in 1995 and countless other places too numerous to mention.
We have also seen that after the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, like Robert Kennedy after the death of his brother as humanity can go through a period of introspection and we came out of it with stronger rules of international law and greater respect for human rights. Respecting these rules seem to be now getting weaker every day to the point that Nigel Farage is talking about deporting tens of thousands of asylum seekers, many of whom could face death, imprisonment and torture if now returned to their countries of origin.
Meanwhile, in Gaza the Israeli government ignores international law at will, allowing children to starve and killing journalists. Do countless people both here and across the world need to go through unnecessary suffering just so that we can learn those lessons all over again, that hatred and division should be avoided, before we can gain the wisdom that Aeschylus talked about?
Learning from the past
It is unfortunate that the humanities subjects have been downgraded by successive governments in our schools. It is from these subjects that we can learn lessons that can help us as a society. It seems that many of the lessons from the past are now being forgotten and that the hard earned wisdom is being thrown away as if of no more consequence than the wrapper around a Mars bar.
Aeschylus had profound insights into human nature. He understood that we do indeed learn from suffering and that wisdom can be gained from painful experiences. However, some 2500 years or so after Aeschylus wrote his famous lines, I do wonder what he would say if he could return and see just how many times we have had to gain wisdom through suffering and then thrust that learning aside and had to do it all again.
Do we really have to go through another period of division and strife, causing enormous suffering to innocent people, before we might have the wisdom again to say stop?
And when it comes to suffering in this country, I am also reminded again of more of Robert Kennedy’s speech on 4 April 1968:
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black… Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
Aeschylus was writing about wars in the Ancient Greek world of his time and it has been noted that he invited the audience to “reflect on the nature of justice, honour, and the heavy toll that war exacts on the human spirit.”
How much do we today examine the true nature of justice, honour and the heavy toll that conflict takes on the human spirit? Do we not sorely need the wisdom that Aeschylus wrote about and that Kennedy showed that dark night in Indianapolis, with us today?
