The riddle

In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: 'Man'. That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus.

-- George Seferis, 1963.

There was a momentary sense that was both a sickening vertigo and a wild freedom. I was without weight, support, structure; I was falling, tumbling, passing through glass and through water into the seadragon's eye while that seadragon was passing into me, and then I was looking out at the bedraggled man staring at me, the man who would, I now had the vanity of hoping, finally tell my story.

-- from Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan.