Tartt's novel is a love letter to ancient Greece, it's also an homage to the Greek tragedies in which the main characters are torn to pieces by a fate engineered by the gods. The beauty in any tragic story is paradoxically found in the terrible destruction of its characters. We voyeuristically absorb a story of a noble character's downfall and degradation and receive a mysterious kind of enjoyment from the experience; which, cannot be reduced to sadism, or to catharsis, or to wallowing in melancholy. There's a strange way in which seeing the inevitable tragedy of life, because all life is tragic in this impermanent and unsatisfying world of ours, in which death awaits all of us at the end; there's a way in which that becomes beautiful, when it is immortalised and celebrated in the dramatic form. Nietzsche calls it a kind of transcendent superordinate joy that accompanies even the most horrific tragedy.

Don't let your internal condition weigh heavily on what you do. the truly great performers are great precisely because they've learned to experience those feelings while side stepping the inclination to act upon them.

The three bright stars across this image are, from left to right, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak: the iconic belt stars of Orion. The rest of the stars in the frame have been digitally removed to highlight the surrounding clouds of glowing gas and dark dust. Some of these clouds have intriguing shapes, including the Horsehead and Flame Nebulas, both near Alnitak on the lower right. The famous Orion Nebula is off to the upper right of this colorful field. The entire region lies only about 1,500 light-years distant and so is one of the closest and best studied star formation nurseries known.

What lights up the Flame Nebula? Fifteen hundred light years away towards the constellation of Orion lies a nebula which, from its glow and dark dust lanes, appears, on the left, like a billowing fire. But fire, the rapid acquisition of oxygen, is not what makes this Flame glow. Rather the bright star Alnitak, the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion visible on the far left, shines energetic light into the Flame that knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there. Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine. The featured picture of the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) was taken across three visible color bands with detail added by a long duration exposure taken in light emitted only by hydrogen. The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a star-forming region that includes the famous Horsehead Nebula.

The dark Horsehead Nebula and the glowing Orion Nebula are contrasting cosmic vistas. Adrift 1,500 light-years away in one of the night sky's most recognizable constellations, they appear in opposite corners of the above stunning mosaic. The familiar Horsehead nebula appears as a dark cloud, a small silhouette notched against the long red glow at the lower left. Alnitak is the easternmost star in Orion's belt and is seen as the brightest star to the left of the Horsehead. Below Alnitak is the Flame Nebula, with clouds of bright emission and dramatic dark dust lanes. The magnificent emission region, the Orion Nebula (aka M42), lies at the upper right. Immediately to its left is a prominent reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man. Pervasive tendrils of glowing hydrogen gas are easily traced throughout the region.

Located roughly 11 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Despite the lack of well-defined arms visible in this image, NGC 2976 is a spiral galaxy.