math and oedipus rex

I forget how much I loathed math so much. Now, I have neither time nor the motivation to learn the stuff of how eigenvectors and eigenvalues are related to each other, or how diagonalization is so important. Well, if I was able to focus all my time on learning it, maybe I could understand it. But I'm just falling behind because my other (significantly more important) classes demand a better part of my attention.

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In other news, I'm reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. I love this play! I read it before, but now after years, I read it with new insights and understandings. My prime interests of late have been not just on fate and free will, but also on ignorance and knowledge. Existentialism, for example. (But I've had this fascination since 10th grade when I read Macbeth, I believe. Maybe even Romeo and Juliet, the moment Romeo screamed, "O, I am Fortune's fool!" A rendition given by Leonardo DiCaprio is particularly memorable.)

Here is Oedipus, an example of what intelligence and knowledge helped save Thebes from the Sphinx. Yet, his interrogation and desire for knowledge exposed himself as his father's murderer and his mother's husband. His children are his brothers and sisters because he sowed the same soil that his father sowed. Yet his knowledge was wholly ignorant of how he would fulfill the prophecy of his life set for him. Yet, his fate was fulfilled before he knew it.

Freud makes a big deal out of Oedipus complex, which cannot be validly applied to the character itself. No, it is the conflict between absurdism of existentialism and a rigid world order where no choice is possible.

It is a great play. It is a most riveting play. It has lasted over two thousand years. It has contributed to the English language a quadrisyllabic epithet that many street gangs throw about with little compunction.

I went on a tangent of thoughts that I would have liked to write down about Oedipus, but perhaps it's better not to have written them down, to let them ferment and grow until I can set them to words.