Menander

The ancient playwright wasn't simply observing that talented people die before their time—he was proposing something far stranger: that an early death might signal blessing rather than tragedy. There's a particular wisdom in recognizing that a life cut short while still in its vigor, still untarnished by compromise and decline, possesses a kind of completion the gods might actually envy. Consider how we speak of artists like Keats or Janis Joplin: our memory of them remains fixed at their most luminous, unmarred by the slow diminishment most of us endure. Menander invites us to see this not as cosmic cruelty but as a peculiar form of grace.