Shakespearean Idol

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

            Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulant.

            I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.

            Nevertheless it hurts me to tell it over, over again. Once was enough: wasn't once enough for me at the time? But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. ... By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. 

--Excerpt from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Offred's tape recording lest she does not get to tell her story to anyone. A tape recording because she's not allowed to read or write. I imagined her hushed voice, somewhat urgent and with hopeful desperation. 

When Mr. Lewis asked me what my favorite book was, I told him it was this one. Because a favorite book should definitely make an under-pressure junior read and stay up late and finish it in three days--forget the pile of homework she has. So I picked it as my Shakespearean Idol piece during spring break and would say it like some lucky spell. It became a lucky spell.  

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! 

Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, 


A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me, 


Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, 


Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? 


And sullen hymns of defeat?

 --Walt Whitman's "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me"

I thought of my junior year when I read this poem. Some poems you feel it right down your spine, and this was it. Last summer I slowly dreaded my junior year. I thought of all those unpleasant Saturday mornings with a standardized test in front of me. I imagined myself with dark circles, with unkempt hair, as a time chaser. And afterwards, into my junior year, when tragedies came I thought of this poem. And then I thought of Whitman. The man I tried to analyze, the man whom I thought was so difficult a poet I peeked in Sparknotes for the first time. But I understood him. That he must have gone through so much more than I have. That I wasn't the only one. 

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173476 

I read the poem. I have not the faintest idea, but loved this stanza. That time will hold its breath lest it goes away, that you and I will both have it--"the time to murder and create," "that lift and drop a question on your plate." I don't think Eliot uses any hard language here, although he did knock me over by the word "etherized" in the beginning. And what does it mean to have measured your life with a teaspoon, like Prufrock states he has? I cannot even dare to try and analyze this poem, or a line of it. I just like it. 

"Sea frozen inside us"

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka 

I used this quote to argue the value of books over that of films, but there is better reason I like this quote. I like Kafka. How Kafka feared his father so much he stuttered in his father's presence, how he was an insomniac and spent those long nights clinging to literature is reason enough. But ever since I read "A Hunger Artist" I could not but marvel at his storytelling. His translated version did not suffice; I wished to read it in its original German language. I think this was when the sea frozen inside me finally broke. 

The Great Gatsby

I don't think so. I had thought it was just a sad romance, but it's so much more than that. It's about a man chasing after a dream, a lost dream called Daisy. He does not know that time cannot be unwound.


His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock... Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place (86). 
--F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

When Gatsby uneasily rests his head on the wall, he inadvertently leans on the clock, and accidentally drops it only to catch it riskily the last moment. Time for Gatsby is no longer functioning properly because of his strife to compensate the time lost in search of Daisy, in search of wealth, in search of his American Dream. And in this moment when he finally meets Daisy after five years, Gatsby is out of his time zone. What is even more striking is that the broken old clock is not Gatsby's nor Daisy's, but Nick's. It is also Nick's time that Gatsby attempts to rewind, and time is thus suspended. 


We overlook some things. Like a word misspelt. For Gatsby, he wanted Daisy so much he overlooked time. For me, it is not a matter of overlooking, but choosing to forgo instead. 

Our Town

EMILY: (Softly, more in wonder than in grief) I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all, everything--I can't look at everything hard enough. --Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

I was looking for a piece to do for my sophomore Shakespearean Idol. I wanted to do something from Ian McEwan's Atonement, but it was checked out from the library then. So I asked Ms. Frkovich and she recommended "Our Town" to me. Lovely play. It was simple, but then left me thinking about the little things in life. And that was just what Thornton Wilder wanted from me: "to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." I do not know much about plays or theatre or Thornton Wilder, but Emily's monologue rang so true to me. We overlook the small worth and luck, we all, like Emily, "can't look at everything hard enough." I remember Lina's essay at Ragdale. She wrote about her grandparents. How they were growing old and how she was growing up. How dumbfounded she was to realize something so profound, only so much later in time. I agree with her belated insight. On a journal entry dated November 8, 2009 I wrote: "I would like to see my parents age as much as they would have liked to see me grow."

1984

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. --Geroge Orwell's 1984 

When Winston wakes up from his dream that convinces him he did not physically murder his mother, he remembers his mother’s gesture of the arm to protect his sister, as if by doing so it could stop her from dying. Winston also remembers the Jewish woman in the war film who, like his mother, had put her arm around her son as if it were bulletproof. He knows that this helpless movement of an arm does not alter anything, or makes any difference, but believes it to be nonetheless powerful because it possesses a natural feeling of love, sacrifice, and protection. He finally comes to realize what the Party has done to human beings.

That was what I wrote my sophomore year. I loved that line, " If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love." I still do. I have it written in my journal. Because it's so true, even in the scary world of 1984. Because love is nothing to be afraid of, because love cannot go away. We do not let love go. 

To Kill A Mockingbird

 

            When he looked around, he must have thought I would start crying again, for he said, “Show you something if you won’t tell anybody.” I said what. He unbuttoned his shirt, grinning shyly.

            “Well, what?”
            “Well can’t you see it?”

            “Well no.”

            “Well it’s hair.”

            “Where?”

            “There. Right there.”

            He had been a comfort to me, so I said it looked lovely, but I didn’t see anything. “It’s real nice, Jem.”

An excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The passage I chose for Shakespearean Idol my freshman year. The page I remember exactly--225--that I would read and read and read again for that same laughter I laughed the first time. The first time I actually laughed aloud reading a book. 

The Handmaid's Tale

"But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance. ... By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are." -Offred/The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood