Don't Look Back in Anger

It was the end of January, and I was standing in the Theatre of Dionysus with the wind cutting through my jacket. The stone seats cascaded down toward what had once been the stage, worn smooth by centuries of weather and tourists. I’d imagined something grander, but most Greek ruins are smaller than you expect. Still, there was something about being in the actual space where tragedies were first performed that made my chest feel tight.

The week before I came to Athens, I’d been rewatching Saint Seiya: Hades Chapter, a Japanese anime that reimagines Greek mythology with armoured warriors and underworld battles, thinking it would put me in the right headspace for visiting ancient ruins.

There’s this arc with Orphée, the Silver Saint who goes down to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. I’d watched it as a teenager and thought it was just another tragic backstory, the kind anime loves to give its characters to make them seem deeper. But watching it again at mid-thirties, I started crying during the scene where he looks back.

The original myth is simple enough. Orpheus charms Hades with his music, gets permission to lead his dead wife back to the living world, but there’s one rule: he can’t look back until they’ve both reached the surface. Of course he looks back. Every version of this story ends the same way. The moment he does, she vanishes forever, pulled back into death.

In the anime version, Orphée doesn’t fail because he’s impatient or doubtful. He’s tricked. The villain Pharaoh creates this false sunlight, and it’s so convincing that Orphée genuinely believes they’ve made it out. He turns around to embrace Eurydice, relief flooding his face, and her lower body immediately turns to stone.

The camera lingers on his expression as he realises what he’s done. And then, instead of running back to the surface alone and saving himself, he just stays. He sits down with his lyre and decides to spend eternity in the underworld, playing music that makes flowers grow in hell.

Standing in that ancient theatre where the original Orpheus myth was probably performed two thousand years ago, watching tourists take selfies on the same stones where audiences once watched actors in masks, I understood something I hadn’t before.

The looking back is about the fact that love requires proof. You can’t just walk forward into the light trusting that the person you love is following behind you in the darkness. At some point, the silence becomes unbearable. The absence of their footsteps, their breathing, any sign that they’re actually there, it breaks you. You have to turn around and see, even if seeing means losing everything.

Maybe the whole point is that the gods know you’re going to turn around. They’re counting on it. The rule exists specifically to be broken because that’s what proves you’re human and not like them, not capable of that kind of cold endurance.

I climbed up to the top and looked down upon the theatre seats to where the stage would have been, trying to imagine it filled with people, the actors performing this story of loss and looking back. A tour group passed by speaking German, their guide explaining something about acoustics. I took a few photos that I knew wouldn’t capture anything meaningful, just grey stone and overcast sky.

That night, back in the Airbnb, I rewatched the Orphée episodes again. The scene where he stays in the underworld, where he tells the petrified Eurydice that he’ll turn this frozen wasteland into a garden just for her, that he’ll play music for her even though she can’t escape from death. The flowers that bloom around him are obviously impossible, growing from dead soil in a realm where nothing should live. But he makes them anyway, note by note, an eternal concert for an audience of one who’s already gone.

Today, I watched Chloé Zhao’s award-winning film Hamnet, and that’s when everything connected. The film is slow, almost unbearably so, and it focuses not solely on Shakespeare but on his wife, Anne (or Agnes), and their twins, Hamnet and Judith.

It makes this suggestion, half-historical and half-mythological, that Hamnet somehow caught the plague in Judith’s place. That he died instead of her in that mysterious way people believed twins were connected. And then it follows Shakespeare as he processes this grief he wasn’t even present for, this death he only learned about in a letter, by writing Hamlet.

In reality, his son Hamnet died young and voiceless. In fiction, Hamlet gets to live long enough to question everything, to speak some of the most famous lines in English literature, to rage against death in blank verse.

It reminds me of a day trip in Shakespeare’s hometown: Stratford-upon-Avon. The town is aggressively quaint. Half-timbered buildings, tourist shops selling Shakespeare-themed tea towels and pencils and shot glasses, buskers performing mediocre Hamlet monologues on street corners for coins.

The house on Henley Street is dark inside, the way all Tudor buildings are. Low ceilings, small windows, that particular smell old buildings have, a mixture of wood and damp and time. They’ve recreated what it might have looked like when Shakespeare lived there, though obviously most of it is reproduction work.

But there’s a room on the second floor, and the guide mentioned casually, the way guides do when they’ve said the same thing a thousand times to a thousand different groups, that this might have been where Hamnet slept. Shakespeare’s son. Who died at eleven of plague in 1596 while his father was in London working.

I remembered I stood there longer than the rest of my tour group. They’d moved on downstairs, already heading toward the gift shop, but I stayed in that small room with its diamond-paned window and its reproduction furniture. Rain was starting to streak the glass. I could hear other tourists below, their voices echoing up through the floorboards, someone laughing about something.

And I thought about Shakespeare in London, writing and rewriting, giving his dead son a voice that would echo for centuries. He couldn’t bring Hamnet back. He couldn’t even get to Stratford in time to say goodbye. But he could write. He could take that name, Hamnet, so close to Hamlet, and he could give his son the words eleven-year-olds don’t get to say: To be, or not to be, that is the question.

It’s the same backward glance. Orpheus turns around in the cave even though he knows the rule. Orphée stays in hell to play for ghosts. Shakespeare writes the same grief over and over in different forms, hoping that somewhere in the repetition he’ll find the version where his son survives, where he gets to hear what Hamnet might have said if he’d lived long enough to say it.

We keep returning to Orpheus because it's the most honest archetype we have about love and loss. It's the version where love doesn't conquer anything. It just makes you turn around even when you know you shouldn't. Every performance of Hamlet is Shakespeare looking back toward that room in Stratford where his son died without him. Every note Orphée played in the frozen underworld is him refusing to accept that his lover forever left him.

On my way back home, I thought about how we’re all essentially doing the same thing. We travel to these places, we watch these films, we read these stories, we revisit these myths, all because we’re trying to make sense of the fundamental unfairness of loss. We’re all standing at the threshold of the underworld, knowing we shouldn’t look back, doing it anyway, because we couldn’t accept the alternatives.

Perhaps art is just the thing we make from looking back. We look back. We write. We play music in hell. We turn sons into princes and silence into soliloquies. We make something beautiful from the breaking, because the act of making is itself a form of resistance. Against forgetting, meaninglessness and the idea that love should know when to let go.

We are often told that the goal of life is to reach the light and to move forward, to heal, to leave the shadows behind. But one of the most human things we ever do is look back at the people we’ve lost, even when we know it will break our hearts all over again, because a heart that stays broken is at least a heart that still remembers.

The wind in Athens is still blowing, and the rain in Stratford is still falling on a window where a boy no longer sleeps. But as long as we keep looking back, as long as we keep turning our grief into something we can sing or see or touch, the silence doesn’t get the last word. We are still there, standing at the edge of the dark, refusing to let go, playing our music for an audience of one.

In the end, we look back to save the part of ourselves that only they knew. And maybe, in that split second of turning, that is enough.