(no subject)

In Frost's next to last notebook, so written I guess in his eighties:

[Someone:] I demand to speak with God

[Someone else:] What is your business with God

S: I couldn't explain that to anybody but God

E: There is not God

S: So much the better perhaps. Because that rules out half my business. If there is no God there can be no future life. The present life is all I should have to worry about.

E: There is no future life. Are you worried about the present life.

S: Even more so because there is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now. Happiness cannot be put off. I must ask to see the highest authority at once.

E: You aren't mocking the saints are you?

S: Saints No! those bare-faced church introductions. Who introduced them to the church? Nobody but themselves. Let me see the highest authority there is on

[Breaks off]

(no subject)

Been 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.