(no subject)

Hamlet is fucking great. The encrustation of half-remembered prior reactions was thick at first, especially around the soliloquies, scaled gradually off until toward the end I remembered but didn't know what would happen next.

And this is the funnest simile imaginable:

Rosencrantz [flattering what must look like paranoia in Claudius, who knows Hamlet killed Polonius meaning to kill him instead]:

The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armor of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance, but much more
That spirit, upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess of majesty
Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined; which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

A boist'rous ruin indeed! I must have noticed this before. How does one continually manage to forget the unforgettable?

(no subject)

I do believe you think what now you speak,
But what we do determine, oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity,
Which now like fruit unripe sticks on the tree,
But fall unshaken when they mellow be.
Most necessary 'tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies,
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies,
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

*

Not that I think you did not love your father,
But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it,
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness growing to a plurisy
Dies in his own too much. That we would do
We should do when we would, for this would changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this should is like a spendthrift's sigh,
That hurts by easing.

How strange to see them come together here. And what is Claudius speaking with the second? (Forgive the blank verse, after eight of these in five weeks I fall into it even in speech.) Is he remembering vacillations before killing his brother? Or how he found he no longer loved his brother in the first place?

Or maybe it's just the great wrong he inflicted that's pulled the veil off of life, just as the infliction of that wrong tore it off for Hamlet--who before wrote love letters and thought about fencing a lot. Those out too far are punished by perspective. We're going to die and don't know what all that's about, betray and are betrayed and aren't sure why, and try to lie things right but it's no ear that's listening, something but no ear. And yet we're clearly marvellous--but what of that? "A long time ago the world begun...but that's all one."

The interest here isn't the avenging or nonavenging, is it? The wrong throws you into the space about the letters, and forces you to read where once you lived. That same life's now unliveable: what vengeance can address this? But what's left to do besides?