THE EVENT HORIZON SYMPOSIUM

 

THE EVENT HORIZON SYMPOSIUM

A Play in Three Acts

Philosophical Comedy with Elements of Magical Realism

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

— Albert Einstein

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

— F. A. Hayek

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The Economists

Adam Smith — Gentle, observant, fond of metaphors and moral sentiments. Father of modern economics; haunted by the possibility that posterity has misread him.

John Maynard Keynes — Elegant, witty, impatient with abstractions that ignore human behavior. Speaks in long sentences that somehow arrive at the right answer.

Milton Friedman — Precise, confident, convinced that markets explain more than philosophers think. Small in stature; immense in certainty.

The Philosophers

Immanuel Kant — Formal, disciplined, speaking as though the universe were a carefully structured argument. Deeply unsettled by informality.

René Descartes — Calm and analytical, constantly returning to doubt and certainty. More cheerful than one might expect.

Martin Heidegger — Intense, poetic, sometimes cryptic, always concerned with Being. Capable of making even a chair seem philosophically threatening.

The Physicists

Albert Einstein — Warm, ironic, skeptical of both metaphysical excess and economic optimism. Wishes he had stayed in the patent office.

Niels Bohr — Playful and paradoxical. Finds contradictions clarifying rather than troubling.

Werner Heisenberg — Quiet, reflective, aware that certainty dissolves when observed too closely. Wonders if this applies to conversations as well.

Setting: A luminous circular space suspended at the event horizon of a black hole. Time is optional.

ACT ONE

The Gathering at the Edge

A strange luminous space. The stage is circular, suspended in infinite darkness. Around it, slow spirals of starlight drift like the afterthoughts of dead suns. Above the stage floats a faint glowing ring — the event horizon of a black hole. Books, chalkboards, coins, and equations drift through the air like leaves caught in a slow tide. Time does not flow here so much as meander. Nine chairs appear gradually, as if reality itself were still deciding whether the meeting should occur.

Scene 1 — Arrival

(A deep gravitational hum. EINSTEIN appears first, his white hair defying what little gravity remains. He peers over the edge of the stage into the dark below.)

EINSTEIN

Ah. A black hole.

When I wrote the equations that permitted such things, I confess I hoped

the universe would have the decency to ignore them.

Apparently the universe has a sense of humor.

And very little shame.

(BOHR and HEISENBERG drift in from opposite directions, orbiting each other briefly before settling.)

BOHR

Albert! What a marvelous location for a conference.

The catering is nonexistent, but the view is extraordinary.

HEISENBERG

Nothing escapes from here.

I find that either terrifying or liberating.

I cannot determine which without affecting the other.

EINSTEIN

Except perhaps bad theories. Those seem to escape anywhere.

(Three philosophers materialize — DESCARTES first, then KANT with his hands clasped, then HEIDEGGER, who immediately looks down as if listening to the floor.)

DESCARTES

I think… therefore I am…

…apparently floating above an incomprehensible abyss.

This is not entirely different from my usual situation.

KANT

This environment is profoundly unsuitable for the exercise of moral law.

There is no ground. There is no perpendicular.

There is not even a sensible up.

And yet, reason persists. It always does.

HEIDEGGER

We have been thrown into the event horizon.

Thrownness. Yes.

At last — a location that matches the concept.

(The three economists arrive last — SMITH thoughtful, KEYNES amused, FRIEDMAN peering at everything as though pricing it.)

SMITH

Gentlemen.

I believe we have been invited to discuss certain matters.

Though I will note the venue suggests someone has given up

on the possibility of a productive outcome.

KEYNES

A place where gravity is infinite and liquidity is impossible.

I have been to conferences like this before.

They are called 'Treasury meetings.'

FRIEDMAN

Sounds like government intervention.

Specifically, the kind where escape velocity requires forms in triplicate.

Scene 2 — The Invisible Hand Meets Quantum Mechanics

(The chairs arrange themselves. The nine figures settle uneasily, as though each expects the others to begin.)

SMITH

If we are to converse — and the evidence suggests we have no alternative —

I propose we begin with the idea most frequently misunderstood.

The invisible hand.

EINSTEIN

Ah yes. A force field for markets.

Invisible, like dark matter. And about as well understood.

FRIEDMAN

Not a force field. A decentralized information system.

Prices coordinate billions of individual decisions without any

central authority, without any explicit communication —

BOHR

So the market behaves like quantum mechanics.

Each transaction a collapsed wave function.

The price exists only at the moment of exchange!

HEISENBERG

Indeed. No one knows the price of a thing

until someone observes it.

And the act of observation changes the price.

SMITH

Gentlemen, I meant merely that individuals pursuing their own interest

can unintentionally benefit society.

It was a metaphor. A rather modest one.

I am alarmed by what has been done with it.

HEIDEGGER

Interest. Society. Benefit.

These are modes of Being.

Before we speak of what the hand does,

we must ask what kind of Being has a hand.

KEYNES

With respect, Professor Heidegger, markets do not operate in ontological time.

They operate in calendar time.

Tuesdays. Fiscal quarters. Panics that begin at ten past two on a Friday afternoon.

Being is a luxury of peacetime.

KANT

The question is not what markets do, but what rational beings ought to do.

A market may distribute efficiently. It cannot distribute justly.

Those are not the same sentence.

FRIEDMAN

People ought to be free. That is sufficient.

KANT

Freedom requires moral law. Without it, freedom is merely appetite with better transport.

KEYNES

And moral law requires employment. Unemployed men do not practice virtue. They practice resentment.

DESCARTES

I doubt all of this. Though I find the doubt itself clarifying.

Scene 3 — Effective Demand at the Edge of the Universe

KEYNES

Let me explain something simple — though I warn you,

simple truths rarely survive a room full of theorists.

The economy collapses when effective demand collapses.

Not money supply. Not regulation. Demand.

When people stop spending, everything stops.

EINSTEIN

You mean like energy?

When the system can no longer sustain its own motion?

KEYNES

Yes. Precisely. Spending is the kinetic energy of civilization.

HEISENBERG

And like energy, one cannot know both its current state and its momentum without interfering with both.

BOHR

Consumer confidence is a wave function!

It exists in superposition — both optimistic and pessimistic —

until someone reads a headline and the wave collapses.

FRIEDMAN

Confidence follows money supply.

Control the quantity of money, and confidence follows as a mathematical consequence.

SMITH

Confidence follows trust. And trust cannot be printed.

KANT

Trust follows duty. A society that fulfills its obligations earns the confidence of its members.

HEIDEGGER

Duty follows Being. You cannot have obligation without first asking what kind of Being is capable of being obligated.

DESCARTES

I remain uncertain about all of this. Which I find more honest than the alternatives.

EINSTEIN

Perhaps we are asking different versions of the same question.

Why does anything hold together at all?

Gravity, trust, confidence, duty — each is a name

for the force that prevents total dispersal.

Scene 4 — The Observer Problem

BOHR

In quantum physics, the observer does not merely witness reality.

The observer participates in constructing it.

There is no fact of the matter before the measurement is made.

SMITH

So the market price depends on who is looking at it?

And how they are looking?

And whether they intend to buy?

HEISENBERG

Precisely.

A watched market behaves differently from an unwatched one.

This is not metaphor. This is structure.

FRIEDMAN

That sounds like central banking. Which is, in my view, the observer problem made catastrophically bureaucratic.

KEYNES

It sounds like speculation. Which is, in my view, unavoidable. And occasionally useful.

KANT

But if the observer shapes the observation,

how can we speak of objective economic law at all?

Are we not simply describing our own projections?

EINSTEIN

God does not play dice with the universe.

I have said this before. It remains my position.

BOHR

Albert, I have told you — stop instructing God on the rules of His own game.

You predicted black holes and then refused to believe in them.

The universe has been extremely patient with you.

(The stars above swirl. A low gravitational tone deepens.)

HEIDEGGER

Perhaps the observer problem is Being itself.

We are the beings for whom Being is a question.

Dasein — being-there — is always already thrown into the act of looking.

We cannot step outside and observe without observing.

DESCARTES

Yes. Which is why I began with the thinking thing.

If I cannot trust the world, I can at least trust the doubt.

Though I confess —

I am having some difficulty doubting the black hole.

Scene 5 — The Philosophers Strike Back

KANT

You economists speak constantly of incentives and outcomes.

Of efficiency and equilibria.

But what of moral obligation?

What of the categorical imperative?

Act only according to that maxim by which you can,

at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

FRIEDMAN

Markets align incentives with outcomes

far more reliably than any categorical imperative.

A baker does not give you bread from duty.

He gives you bread because he needs your money.

And the bread is excellent nonetheless.

KANT

The bread may be excellent.

But if the baker adulterates his flour

because no one is watching —

we have lost something that the price cannot restore.

SMITH

Professor Kant makes a point I agree with more than I am often given credit for.

I wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments before The Wealth of Nations.

I considered it the more important work.

History, as usual, disagreed with me.

KEYNES

And yet economists remember only the invisible hand.

They have turned a modest metaphor into a religion

and forgotten the moral philosopher who coined it.

HEIDEGGER

Perhaps because they have forgotten Being. When Being is forgotten, only function remains.

EINSTEIN

I assure you, gravity has not forgotten Being. It acts on everything, regardless of its opinions about itself.

(The stars swirl faster. The event horizon brightens. The chairs drift slightly, as if the floor is no longer quite trustworthy.)

BOHR

Gentlemen — I believe the horizon is approaching.

HEISENBERG

Or we are approaching it. The distinction may be meaningless.

DESCARTES

How can we be certain which?

KANT

We can be certain that our duty to continue thinking does not change, regardless of the direction of travel.

KEYNES

A stoic position, Professor.

Though I would note that in the long run,

we are all quite thoroughly absorbed.

Lights fade slowly. The gravitational hum deepens.

End of Act One

ACT TWO

Ontology in Free Fall

The stage tilts five degrees. Chairs are slightly askew. The glow of the event horizon is brighter — a ring of fire in the dark above. Time appears fractured: clocks drift past the stage ticking both forward and backward. A single white chalkboard floats in the middle of the space, covered in equations from multiple disciplines simultaneously — none of them agreeing with each other.

Scene 1 — Being and Time Under Extreme Gravity

HEIDEGGER

Time is not a container in which events occur.

Time is the structure of care — of Sorge.

We are always already ahead of ourselves, behind ourselves,

and alongside the world simultaneously.

This is what it means to exist.

EINSTEIN

Time is also curved.

Near a sufficiently massive object,

it flows more slowly.

Time is a geometric property of space.

Not a structure of care. A structure of mass.

HEIDEGGER

The two descriptions are not incompatible. Near enough to death, time always seems to slow.

EINSTEIN

That is either a very deep observation or a very dark joke.

I have decided it is both.

KEYNES

In financial crises, time collapses entirely.

The past becomes worthless — your assets, your expectations, your plans.

The future becomes unknowable.

There is only the present moment of panic,

which is somehow both instantaneous and interminable.

FRIEDMAN

Only if monetary policy fails. Sound money is the anchor that keeps time from becoming hysteria.

SMITH

Or if trust disappears. I have observed that men will accept poverty more readily than they will accept betrayal.

KANT

Time and space are the forms of human intuition. They are not given to us from outside. We bring them to experience.

BOHR

Inside a black hole, intuition seems unreliable as a navigational tool.

KANT

Intuition is a faculty, not a compass.

It does not point north.

It makes north possible.

DESCARTES

I have always found time deeply suspicious.

It passes when you are not watching it.

It slows when you are.

It has never once asked permission to proceed.

Scene 2 — The Uncertainty Principle Meets Policy

HEISENBERG

One cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle

with arbitrary precision.

This is not a failure of measurement.

It is a fundamental feature of nature.

The universe does not possess these properties simultaneously.

It cannot be pressed to choose.

FRIEDMAN

In economics, we cannot measure both inflation and unemployment

without the act of policy measurement itself distorting the variables.

It is called Goodhart's Law.

Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.

KEYNES

That is because you insist on measuring instead of managing.

I am not interested in the precise thermometer reading.

I am interested in whether the patient is getting better.

EINSTEIN

Gentlemen, uncertainty is a property of nature.

Not a policy mistake.

Not a failure of nerve.

Not something that better data will resolve.

It is the texture of reality at small scales —

and perhaps at all scales, if Niels is to be believed.

BOHR

I am to be believed. I am also not to be believed. These are consistent positions.

DESCARTES

I have made a career of similar territory. It is more comfortable than it appears.

KANT

The true question is not whether we can know,

but what the limits of knowledge obligate us to do.

If we cannot be certain, we must be principled.

Uncertainty is not permission for arbitrariness.

It is a call to greater moral rigor.

HEIDEGGER

Or it is a call to authenticity.

To acknowledge that we do not know —

that our projections are projections —

and to act anyway, in full view of the groundlessness beneath us.

Which, in the present situation, is more than metaphorical.

Scene 3 — On Value

SMITH

I should like to raise the question of value.

Not because I have resolved it.

But because I suspect we are all avoiding it.

What makes a thing worth having?

FRIEDMAN

What someone will pay for it. That is the complete answer.

SMITH

Then why do people give their lives for things no one would purchase?

FRIEDMAN

Because —

Because some preferences are very strong.

And we do not judge preferences.

KEYNES

That is a remarkable abdication.

The economists says: I will not judge what you want.

I will only tell you whether you can get it.

Meanwhile the thing that everyone wants most —

dignity, purpose, a life worth living —

floats around outside the model, entirely unmeasured.

KANT

Value, properly understood, has two kinds.

Price — what a thing can be exchanged for.

And dignity — what cannot be exchanged at all.

Human beings have dignity.

Goods have price.

The error of every purely market society

is to confuse the one for the other.

EINSTEIN

In physics, we speak of energy.

Not good or bad energy. Not expensive or cheap energy.

Simply the capacity to do work.

Perhaps value is the capacity to sustain life.

The rest is accounting.

HEIDEGGER

Value is how Being shows up as mattering.

A thing has value when it is disclosed as significant

within a world of care and concern.

The hammer is valuable not because it can be sold

but because it drives the nail that builds the house

that shelters the child.

Value is the shape that Being takes in a human life.

BOHR

I wonder if value is like the electron.

It has no definite position until measured.

Before the transaction, the thing is both valuable and not valuable,

in superposition.

The exchange collapses it into a price.

But the price is not the value.

The price is only what we agreed to see.

DESCARTES

I find myself persuaded by all of these positions simultaneously.

This has never been a problem before today.

Scene 4 — Responsibility

KANT

We have now arrived at the question I consider most important.

Freedom implies responsibility.

Not occasionally. Not when convenient.

As a matter of logical necessity.

A free being that takes no responsibility

is a contradiction in terms.

FRIEDMAN

Responsibility belongs to individuals.

When you distribute responsibility to governments and institutions,

you dilute it until it belongs to no one,

and then you are surprised when no one exercises it.

KEYNES

Also to governments.

The individual cannot bear the weight of a banking crisis.

The individual cannot single-handedly maintain aggregate demand.

The individual cannot prevent the failure of systemic institutions

simply by being personally responsible.

There are problems that only collective action can address.

Pretending otherwise is not principle. It is abandonment.

SMITH

Also to institutions.

I believed in the moral function of commerce —

not because markets are naturally just,

but because they can create conditions in which just behavior is rewarded.

But they must be cultivated. Watched. Corrected.

The invisible hand is not a substitute for judgment.

It is, at best, a supplement to it.

EINSTEIN

Also to scientists.

I wrote the equations.

I did not intend for anyone to build the things the equations permitted.

I did not know what would follow from what I had shown was possible.

This is, I think, the deepest version of responsibility:

for what we make possible,

not merely for what we intend.

HEISENBERG

I know something about that.

Scene 5 — The Second Collapse

(The stage tilts further. A low grinding sound, as of immense machinery. The chalkboard begins spinning slowly. The equations shift.)

BOHR

Something is changing.

HEISENBERG

We are closer than we were.

DESCARTES

I can no longer determine whether we are moving or the horizon is.

EINSTEIN

The two are equivalent. This has always been true. We simply prefer the version in which we are stationary.

KEYNES

In 1936 I watched the world slip toward catastrophe

while economists insisted the market would correct itself.

It did. Eventually.

After enough men had died to provide the necessary aggregate demand reduction.

FRIEDMAN

In 1970 I watched governments inflate their way to stagflation

while Keynesians insisted demand management would save them.

It did not.

The cure was worse than the disease,

and the disease was partly the cure.

SMITH

Gentlemen, I have been listening to this argument for two hundred and fifty years.

It ends the same way every time.

Both of you are right.

Both of you are dangerously incomplete.

And neither of you is willing to say so in public.

(A long pause. KEYNES and FRIEDMAN look at each other.)

KEYNES

He is not entirely wrong.

FRIEDMAN

He is not entirely right.

SMITH

Progress.

The lights dim. The gravitational hum rises to a resonant chord.

End of Act Two

ACT THREE

The Threshold

The stage is now nearly vertical. The nine figures cling to their chairs, which have fused to the floor. The event horizon fills the entire sky — a ring of impossible fire. Stars beyond it are stretched into long threads of light. Inside the ring: pure black. The gravitational hum is constant and enormous. Time here is genuinely strange — words occasionally arrive before they are spoken. Some lines will feel faintly familiar, as if heard before.

Scene 1 — The Ultimate Question

BOHR

There is a question I have been avoiding.

I suspect we all have.

What is reality?

DESCARTES

That which survives doubt.

If I can doubt it and it persists,

it is real.

If I can doubt it and it dissolves,

it was only an idea wearing the costume of a fact.

KANT

That which conforms to the conditions of possible experience.

Reality is not what is independent of minds.

Reality is what minds can coherently encounter.

The thing-in-itself — the noumenon —

lies beyond the reach of knowledge.

We see the world as we are built to see it.

This is not a limitation.

It is what having a world means.

HEIDEGGER

Reality is what is unconcealed.

Aletheia — truth as disclosedness.

Things are real insofar as they emerge from hiddenness

into the clearing of Being.

And they may return to hiddenness.

The black hole is not unreal.

It is maximally real.

It is the place where concealment is total.

SMITH

That which allows society to flourish.

I am perhaps the least metaphysically ambitious person in this room.

But I have always believed that a theory of reality

which tells us nothing about how to live

is a theory which has failed at the most important test.

KEYNES

That which maintains employment.

That which makes it possible for a man to go to work on Monday,

provide for his family,

keep his dignity,

and not be seized by the particular despair

of watching the world stop needing him.

A reality in which that is possible is, to me, the only acceptable one.

FRIEDMAN

That which markets discover.

I do not say this as mere ideology.

I say it because the market aggregates information

that no single mind can hold.

It is the closest thing we have

to a machine for finding out what is true about value.

It is imperfect.

It is still the best instrument we have built.

HEISENBERG

That which cannot be fully known.

Every description of reality changes reality.

Every measurement is a negotiation.

Every answer creates new questions.

Reality is not a stable object.

It is a process.

A process that includes the questioner.

EINSTEIN

That which remains when the equations are beautiful.

I know this is not rigorous.

I know beauty is not proof.

But in every case where I followed the beautiful equation

rather than the convenient one,

the universe agreed with me.

I do not know why this should be.

But I trust it more than I trust most other things.

Scene 2 — What We Cannot Know

(The light from beyond the event horizon begins to redshift. Objects at the edge of the stage begin to stretch.)

HEISENBERG

We are at the threshold. Beyond this point, information cannot return.

BOHR

Which means we cannot know what is on the other side. Not even in principle.

DESCARTES

Then this is the ultimate test of my method. If doubt cannot reach beyond the horizon, what remains?

KANT

What remains is the moral law.

It does not depend on what is beyond the horizon.

It does not require information about outcomes.

It is prior to all experience.

Even this one.

HEIDEGGER

What remains is Being-toward-death.

We have always been moving toward the horizon.

We merely know it now.

Authenticity is not changed by proximity to its occasion.

If anything, it is clarified.

KEYNES

What remains is the animal spirits.

The irrational, incorrigible human drive

to do something rather than nothing.

To build, to invest, to risk.

Even here.

Even now.

I find this — despite everything — rather admirable.

FRIEDMAN

What remains is the price system.

Though I admit it may be experiencing some volatility at present.

SMITH

What remains is sympathy.

The capacity to imagine yourself inside another person's situation.

To feel what they feel.

To be moved by it.

This — not the invisible hand — was always the foundation.

This was the argument I made first.

I should have been louder about it.

EINSTEIN

What remains is curiosity.

I have never been able to shake it,

even when it led me here.

Especially when it led me here.

I want to know what is inside.

This is either admirable or terrible.

Possibly both.

BOHR

What remains is complementarity.

The wave and the particle.

The certain and the uncertain.

The dead and the alive.

The real and the possible.

Perhaps the answer to your question, Descartes,

is that what remains on the other side of the horizon

is the complementary description of everything we know on this side.

The part of the universe that can only be seen

from a perspective that cannot report back.

HEISENBERG

That is the most beautiful and most useless answer I have ever heard.

BOHR

Yes. I thought you'd appreciate it.

Scene 3 — The Invisible Horizon

(The black hole now fills the sky. Stars stretch into threads, then into silence. Light bends visibly at the edges of the stage. The figures are lit from below, strangely, warmly.)

SMITH

Gentlemen.

What happens when we cross?

EINSTEIN

From the perspective of someone outside — nothing.

Time dilation means they will never quite see us cross.

We will appear to freeze at the horizon,

reddening, fading,

vanishing so slowly we seem to remain forever.

To them, we are still here.

We will always still be here.

KEYNES

How extraordinary.

The outside world inherits a frozen image of us

at the moment of our greatest uncertainty.

That is, remarkably, how intellectual legacies work.

KANT

We will appear to them as we were,

not as we are.

This is the essential problem of all transmission of thought across time.

The student receives the frozen image.

The living teacher has already moved on.

HEIDEGGER

The tradition conceals as much as it reveals.

Destruction — Destruktion — is necessary.

Not to demolish the past,

but to dismantle the interpretations

that have hardened over the living thought

and made it impossible to breathe.

SMITH

I have been misread for two hundred and fifty years.

I can confirm: Destruktion would be welcome.

(A sound like the universe taking a breath.)

BOHR

Perhaps this is simply another experiment.

An experiment with no external observer.

An experiment that cannot be reported.

These are, in a sense, the most honest experiments.

No one can disagree with the results.

HEISENBERG

With unknown results.

DESCARTES

But at least one thing is certain.

FRIEDMAN

What?

DESCARTES

We are thinking.

Even now.

Even here.

Even falling.

The thought persists.

Cogito — ergo sum.

I think. Therefore I am.

I think. Therefore something is.

Whatever lies beyond the horizon —

it will be encountered by a thinking thing.

That seems, to me, not nothing.

Scene 4 — The Final Synthesis

(They look at one another — physicists, philosophers, economists — across the impossible distance of their different vocabularies. For a moment, they are simply nine people at the edge of something vast.)

SMITH

Then perhaps the invisible hand…

KEYNES

…the insufficiency of aggregate demand…

FRIEDMAN

…the signal in the price…

KANT

…the legislative power of reason…

DESCARTES

…the one thing that cannot be doubted…

HEIDEGGER

…Being and time and the clearing of the world…

BOHR

…the wave and the particle, each real, each incomplete…

HEISENBERG

…the irreducible uncertainty at the heart of measurement…

EINSTEIN

…and the beauty of the equation that tells the truth it did not mean to tell…

(Together, overlapping, a fugue of voices:)

ALL

…are different names for the same question:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why does it cohere?

Why does it mean anything at all?

And why — above all — do we insist on asking?

(The horizon engulfs the stage. The light does not simply go out — it stretches, reddens, and fades so slowly that for a long moment the stage seems to remain, the figures frozen in the amber of extreme gravity. Then: black. Then: silence.)

(A final voice echoes from very far away — or from very long ago:)

EINSTEIN

Next time…

…let us meet somewhere with less gravity.

Somewhere they serve coffee.

And allow smoking.

And do not mind if the equations run long.

END OF PLAY

A Note on the Play

The Event Horizon Symposium imagines what might happen if the foundational figures of modern economics, philosophy, and physics were forced to argue across their disciplines in a location from which no argument — however precise — could ultimately escape. The black hole is not metaphor. It is the condition of all intellectual endeavor: the awareness that every framework has a horizon beyond which its own tools cannot reach.

The economists disagree with each other (they always have). The philosophers disagree with the economists (this is their vocation). The physicists find the entire argument both fascinating and somewhat below their pay grade. Everyone, in the end, is trying to answer the same question from a different angle — and every answer is partial, every certainty provisional, every horizon, by definition, a limit that cannot be seen past from the inside.

This is not a tragedy. It is a comedy in the classical sense — a comedy about people trying very hard to understand things that may not be fully understandable, and finding, in the attempt, something that resembles grace.