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Sep. 2nd, 2009 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBeen thinking about Hamlet's famousest soliloquy. You know the one--short version: Does it reflect better on me to take all this misery stoically or to die fighting? And if I die does that really end it, or is there just more misery to follow, and of some unknowable quantity and kind? Ultimately there's no telling, and I guess that's why we all just take it.
It's confusing that Christians let this be enshrined as a cultural high point (many things about these Christians are confusing). I guess they have some vague sense that it shows how God's shell game with his own existence teaches us to endure evil. That seems foreign to the very universe of this language: the fascinating thing about it is that engagement with Christianity, or something sounding like it, should be cued exactly here. But he's not talking God and heaven, he's talking Something, and not the way people who annoy me by saying they believe "in something out there" talk--like there's a consoling hand on their back they're just not sure whose.
Hamlet doesn't expect well of the aftersomething. It's bad, for him, because it's more existence, and he judges existence to have so far been all wrong; it's worse, for him, because it might be worse. This latter point might explain some of his this-existence-is-bad judgment. The good things he had went away, therefore weren't good. Some crucial part of the good is the promise of more of the same good, is that you can trust it. Some crucial part of the bad may thus be that there's no promise of more of the same, no reason to think you'll get used to it, learn how to take it.
It should startle us that we're hearing of afterthings but not of gods (just as much as that the prospect of more life is being deplored as a horror). The only thing person-like in Hamlet's cosmology (this one, anyway) is people. A god here, if there were one, would have to be vile. The speech pines for a merely material world in which Hamlet could peacefully let himself die.
It's confusing that Christians let this be enshrined as a cultural high point (many things about these Christians are confusing). I guess they have some vague sense that it shows how God's shell game with his own existence teaches us to endure evil. That seems foreign to the very universe of this language: the fascinating thing about it is that engagement with Christianity, or something sounding like it, should be cued exactly here. But he's not talking God and heaven, he's talking Something, and not the way people who annoy me by saying they believe "in something out there" talk--like there's a consoling hand on their back they're just not sure whose.
Hamlet doesn't expect well of the aftersomething. It's bad, for him, because it's more existence, and he judges existence to have so far been all wrong; it's worse, for him, because it might be worse. This latter point might explain some of his this-existence-is-bad judgment. The good things he had went away, therefore weren't good. Some crucial part of the good is the promise of more of the same good, is that you can trust it. Some crucial part of the bad may thus be that there's no promise of more of the same, no reason to think you'll get used to it, learn how to take it.
It should startle us that we're hearing of afterthings but not of gods (just as much as that the prospect of more life is being deplored as a horror). The only thing person-like in Hamlet's cosmology (this one, anyway) is people. A god here, if there were one, would have to be vile. The speech pines for a merely material world in which Hamlet could peacefully let himself die.
