Tragedy shows what is perishable, what is fragile, and what is slow moving about us. In a world defined by relentless speed and the unending acceleration of information flows that cultivate amnesia and an endless thirst for the short-term future allegedly guaranteed through worship of the new prosthetic gods of technology, tragedy is a way of applying the emergency brake.
Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, p. 3
Here in the first paragraph of his book, Critchley treats us to two sentences of rhetorical delight. The first sentence is balanced, succinct, stately, and tricolonic. Its three dependent clauses ('what...what...what....) move with the deliberateness of the strophe and antistrophe of a Greek Tragic chorus. The first sentence in no way prepares the reader for the second, which is fitting since the second sentence comes in like a tsunami sweeping all before it. It just keeps coming. The thirty-six word prepositional phrase depending on 'In' not only describes 'a world defined' but it portrays that world magnificently. It both shows and tells. Finally arriving at the main clause and finding the last two words of the sentence to be 'emergency brake', I laughed out loud with delight. It's just magnificent. That paragraph alone was worth the price of the book.
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