Welcome to Hell; Whoa, This Place Looks Familiar

I'm teaching Gilgamesh this week.  It's a really old ass poem (it's basically like the first thing ever written down on a clay tablet).  I've never taught it before.  If I'm being perfectly honest, I've never even read it before.  At least, not carefully.  I was assigned it in undergrad, but that was in a class I took with this guy I had major crush on (alas, it didn't work out, as he didn't notice me at all except to ask if he could copy my homework) so the reading assignments were not much of a priority.  (Note to Brooke in college:  You can do better.  And you will!)

Anyway.  I'm prepping for class, I'm reading through the poem again, and I come to a moment that takes my breath away.  It's this weird point toward the end of the poem where Gilgamesh's dead friend Enkidu has sort of been resurrected.  Also, Gilgamesh has accidentally let his really special, magical, super awesome drum fall down into Hell.  Oopsies!  It was a gift from a goddess, and it's kind of a big deal.  So he calls on his dead friend Enkidu to go down and get it.  Enkidu is apparently an agreeable sort of fellow, so he ventures down into Hell to fetch the drum.  And then there's this:

Around him, the lament for the dead arose;
for she alone, in that sad place, is at home who,
having given birth to beauty,
has watched that beauty die.

That's the definition of Hell.

It was written almost 5,000 years ago.  On a clay tablet.  With a freaking stick.

"Who," the ancient, toga-wearing, sandal-sporting writer wonders, "Who could possibly feel at home in Hell?  Oh, I know.  Somebody who feels like they're living in it every day.  Someone who has lost a child."

She alone, in that sad place, is at home.

And THAT is why I teach literature.  Because everything that matters, everything that makes us human and connected to one another, every joyful and anguished moment of our suffering gets worked out and puzzled over and articulated again and again.  And sometimes you discover that someone who lived centuries before you, on the other side of the world, in a place you can't really even imagine, went through Hell.  And lived to tell about it.