Loss of meaning after trauma

Homer's experience is one of seeing human life through the frame of inevitable fate. His experience is shaped by a world where life is exposed to war, human endurance and death as not random but structurally expected. In the Iliad, characters act with full awareness that their choices unfold toward an already known tragic endpoint. Yet within that inevitability, their actions still carry weight of bravery, pride, rage, grief and love are intensified precisely because they exist under the shadow of death. This perspective can change how we understand human actions, revealing them as heroic in nature even when they move toward a predetermined tragic ending.

We can't do this with real life tragedy. Real life tragedy drains life meaning, makes it nearly impossible for us to feel. Indeed in some real radical cases it renders feelings impossible for all the time. Nietzsche's words are often recalled here, 'what does not kill us makes us stronger' but real life often contradicts this. What does not kill us can just as easily traumatize us. I want to crush the awful cliché about that suffering produces strength, maturity or virtue whether through grief, loss, trauma or the forced passage into adulthood is deeply misleading. Sometimes these experiences do not necessarily refine character or confer meaning. Instead, they can fracture it, sealing off parts of our emotional life and limiting our capacity to feel. Real-life tragedy, is often stripped of meaning rather than filled with it.

Art, however, allows us to feel. Perhaps even after the paralyzing and numbing traumas of real life and when we are moved deeply by art. We feel our tears and they are evidence that we are human and this gives us one of the strangest and most severe pleasures in life, which come to think of it like the intimations of the sort of pleasures that await in celestial paradise.