Imagine what Europeans might have created: a constitution drawing on centuries of political experience and informed by tragic wisdom borne of millenniums of wars; a document influenced by European philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau, Hume and Kant, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, who addressed fundamental questions about government and human nature.
Her portraits are bittersweet, haunting, and occasionally too tragic to bear.
What's different now is that, sometime before the third debate, this man faced and centered himself in the tragic optimism, borne of a broken heart, that is every American's lot and is every great president's even more so.
In between came Sarah Van Patten's cool intensity as she moved between Mr. Helimets and Vito Mazzeo, in a tragic interlude that bore no relation to the rest of the ballet, but which she nonetheless rendered compelling.
Yet the work has a shattering tragic impact and bears out the precept stated by another German tragic dramatist of the 19th century, Friedrich Hebbel: "One need only be a man, after all, to have a destiny".
The suicide note of Jude the Obscure's son was impossibly pitiful, not least because his tragic act was borne of good intentions.
According to the case that the prosecution is developing against Madsen, his final "story" bears tragic witness to a ruthless commitment to the "personal freedom" he claimed the Nautilus represented.
In addressing the spiraling violence in Gaza, Mrs. Clinton spoke more fully than either she or Mr. Obama had done previously, and she seemed to part from the tone set by the Bush administration in calling attention to what she described as the "tragic humanitarian costs" borne by Palestinians as well as Israelis.
It was only one short year ago that we all bore witness to the tragic earthquake that wreaked havoc on Haiti.
