All the talk last week on death at first glance seemed rather depressing. I don’t consider myself an optimist nor a downer, somewhere in between I guess. In Act 3, scene 2, when Hamlet is giving advice to the actors, to me it is more than advice to the actors, but could be advice to everyone in life. Hamlet is describing the art of speaking with a bit of rhetoric perhaps. I really liked the last sentence,”For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of this time his form and pressure.” I certainly know at times in my life, had a mirror been in front of me I probably would have toned down my behavior, no, actually I would have probably ratcheted it up several notches and overplayed my hand as I often have. Hamlet seems to be a perfectionist and if it wasn’t perfect, then it was shit. Steve Jobs was notorious at Apple of telling people what he really thought, which wasn’t pretty if you were being told that your product is ultimately shit with a bunch of F bombs.
After reading Hamlet and still missing several points, I read Marjorie Garber’s take on Hamlet and came across a gem,”The split between words and thought, words and meaning, is essential to the way Hamlet works. When the everyday language of human beings cannot be trusted, the only “safe” language is deliberate fiction, plays and lies. The only safe world is the world of imagination, not the corrupt and uncontrollable world of politics,”(483). This could be interpreted to a call to some serious shenanigans, or to live life to the fullest and on your terms. Life is short and the only thing certain is that life will end at some point, so might as well enjoy it. Since in America something like 70 percent of congress is lawyers, maybe if the Secret Service suddenly got hypnotized by Shakespeare and killed all the lawyers, then politics might not be as corrupt and uncontrollable.
I’ve been slowly reading Joyce’s Ulysses and with the hope to come out of it with about 10 percent of the book. Hamlet has been popping up quite a bit and the message I’m getting is to LIVE. Maybe I should go skydiving.
To be, or not to be: 