Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, is featured in the NYT, and he tells us about what drives him to make art: “The mission that I feel like I have is to figure out how you can tell the truth about how tragic and unfair life actually is without destroying hope.”

After the death of his sixteen-year-old son, Lin-Manuel Miranda sent him a demo recording of “It’s Quiet Uptown”–“For me, the beautiful thing about ‘Quiet Uptown’ is, it serves a ritualistic function—it takes us into the grief, and then it takes us out of it. And there’s nothing, there’s no other ritual that I know of, that can do that for me.”

I’m reminded of Lionel Trilling’s words, on the occasion of Robert Frost’s 85th birthday:

“And I hope you will not think it graceless of me that on your birthday I have made you out to be a poet who terrifies.  When I began to speak, I called your birthday Sophoclean, and that word has controlled everything I said about you.  Like you, Sophocles lived to a great age, writing well; and like you, Sophocles was the poet his people loved most. . . .  I think that they loved him chiefly because he made plain to them the terrible things of human life; they felt, perhaps, that only a poet who could make plain the terrible things could possibly give them comfort.”