“Elegies are attempts at reconciliation and redemption, works of mourning in the sense intended by Freud. Strauss’s Metamorphosen is not, in that sense an elegy. It is a work de profundis, which looks back to what has been lost as the returning traveller looks at the bombed-out remnants of his city, in which not a survivor can be found. It is a work without hope, and without any promise for the future. Yet for all that, it is a great work of art; and one that still speaks to us.”
–Someone tell me please: Does nt novelist Walker Percy tell the same story — see Love in the Ruins
