Alison Byrd: Mystical Love as a Transformative Force

    Thomas Van Nortwick’s Somewhere I Have Never Traveled explores the emotional depth of Greek tragedy, borrowing its title from E.E. Cummings’ poem to suggest that love, like fate and death, can be a mysterious, transformative force. In both poetry and myth, love often draws individuals into unfamiliar emotional territory, challenging their identities and reshaping their paths.

    Cummings’ poem speaks of a love so powerful it causes the speaker to surrender entirely, using imagination to evoke vulnerability. Similarly, in ancient myths and tragedies discussed by Van Nortwick, characters transformed not just external events, but by deep emotional bonds that lead to insight or ruin.

    Van Nortwick describes stories where love functions as a kind of mystical journey as it opens hidden parts of the self and demands courage, much like the quests undertaken by mythic heroes. As Van Nortwick shows, love in tragedy is not sentimental, it is profound and often painful, revealing that, like heroic courage, love is a force that changes everything.

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