Nice link from Two Sleepy Mommies entitled What Use Literature?:
What it means to be human, [Sophocles] shows us, is that you take responsibility for your actions. In a world of uncertainty and chance, where so much is out of our control, this is the only way we can assert that we are moral creatures with free will, whose doings have meaning, rather than being just part of the mere flux and confusion of brute creation. This is a hard doctrine, but one that has undiminished resonance for us in our own era, whose search for extenuation and victimization diminishes rather than ennobles all it touches. And it is this acceptance of responsibility that makes Oedipus truly a tragic hero, with equal emphasis on both those words.
Now flash forward two millennia to a dramatic world that seems as though it belongs on another planet, the world of Mozart’s magical comic opera Cos&#igrave; Fan Tutte—“They All Do It.” Its libretto, written by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the libretti for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro before ending up in New York as Columbia’s first professor of Italian, tells the wonderfully silly story of a bet two handsome young men make with their cynical older friend. Your two girlfriends, the older man says, whom you claim to be paragons of faithfulness, will not stay true to you if put to the test. Pretend to be called off to war, then come back disguised as noble Albanians, woo each other’s girls, and you’ll see.
Well, you know the result. But when the boys pretend to go off to war, the girls sing such a piercingly sweet lament of loss and farewell (for we are in a realm of literature-plus) that you know their love is real, even though they later fall for the supposed Albanians and so prove—temporarily—unfaithful. And the opera’s point is that, yes, from one point of view, one good-looking boy is much like another; still, from another point of view, the person we choose is unique and special and the only one for us. We are creatures of animal instinct; but as we marshal that indiscriminate instinct into an act of discriminating and binding choice, we transform the natural into the human and create a new realm of feeling and meaning in the process.
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