Tag Archives: Hamlet

Looking for Friends in Fiction

20 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Literature

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Claire-Messud

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?'”

__________

Claire Messud’s response when asked if she’d want to be friends with her “unlikable” characters.

Darkness Visible

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Biography, Psychology

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William Styron

“Since antiquity — in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus — chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe — from Hamlet’s soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Durer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.

For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

William Styron

__________

From the closing pages of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron’s register of his descent into depression.

Thanks D. for recommending this one to me.

William Styron was born today in 1925. Darkness Visible, his most intensely revealing and personal book, is an utterly haunting chronicle of madness and melancholy — one which drags you, as Virgil does through the inferno, down Styron’s steep and rocky path into the depths of psychological suffering. The book opens with Styron, an acclaimed author of fiction, arriving at a lavish Paris hotel to accept a coveted literary award. This rainy Parisian night, however, is the moment wherein his own “brain storm” emerges over the horizon, bringing with it an enervating disease of the mind which he comes to call melancholia. The remainder of the short text is an utterly brutal yet lucid look at just what this afflication is and is not.

The passage above is the book’s ending, and it finishes Styron’s story, as Dante’s, in the clarity and serenity of a long desired return to sunlight and air. It also illustrates handsomely Styron’s unmatched technical skill as a writer.

From a Spring 1954 interview with Styron in the Paris Review:

Does your emotional state have any bearing on your work?

I guess like everybody I’m emotionally fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I’m relatively placid. It’s hard to say, though. If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done. Actually— though I don’t take advantage of the fact as much as I should —I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. When I’m writing I find it’s the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well. It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time—for jittery people. Besides, I’ve discovered that when I’m not writing I’m prone to developing certain nervous tics, and hypochondria. Writing alleviates those quite a bit.

I think I resist change more than most people. I dislike traveling, like to stay settled. When I first came to Paris all I could think about was going home, home to the old James River. One of these days I expect to inherit a peanut farm. Go back home and farm them old peanuts and be real old Southern whisky gentry.

Styron

Christopher for William F. Buckley

04 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Speeches

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Christopher Buckley

The following is Christopher Buckley’s eulogy for his father, William F. Buckley. This is one of the most subtle tributes to a person that you will ever read. Christopher is funny and honest about his father, without ever stooping to sentimentality or sappiness. I highly recommend reading this or watching C-Span’s video of the speech here.

__________

“We talked about this day, he and I, a few years ago. He said to me, ‘If I’m still famous, try to convince the Cardinal to do the service at St. Patrick’s. If I’m not, just tuck me away in Stamford.’

Well, Pup, I guess you’re still famous.

I’d like to thank Cardinal Egan and Msgr. Ritchie of the archdiocese for their celestial hospitality, and Fr. Rutler for his typically gracious words. I’d also like to thank Dr. Jennifer Pascual, musical director of St. Patrick’s, as well as the St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir, and organists Donald Dumler and Rick Tripodi for such beautiful music.

Pope Benedict will be saying Mass here in two weeks. I was told that the music at this Mass for my father would, in effect, be the dress rehearsal for the Pope’s. I think that would have pleased him, though doubtless he’d have preferred it to be the other way around.

I do know he’d have been pleased, amidst the many obituaries and tributes, by the number of editorial cartoons that depicted him at the Pearly Gates. One showed St. Peter groaning, ‘I’m going to need a bigger dictionary.’ If I disposed of the cartoonist’s skills, I might draw one showing a weary St. Peter greeting the Fed Ex man, ‘Let me guess — another cover story on Mr. Buckley?’

My mother is no longer with us, so we can only speculate as to how she might react to these depictions of her husband of 56 years arriving in Paradise so briskly. My sense is that she would be vastly amused.

On the day he retired from Firing Line after a 33-year long run, Nightline (no relation) did a show to mark the occasion. At the end, Ted Koppel said, ‘Bill, we have one minute left. Would you care to sum up your 33 years in television?’ To which my father replied, ‘No.’

Taking his cue, I won’t attempt to sum him up in my few minutes here. A great deal has been written and said about him in the month since he died, at his desk, in his study in Stamford. After I’d absorbed the news, I sat down to compose an e-mail. My inner English major ineluctably asserted itself and I found myself quoting (misquoting, slightly) a line from Hamlet,

He was a man, Horatio, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

One of my first memories of him was of driving up to Sharon, Connecticut for Thanksgiving. It would have been about 1957. He had on the seat between us an enormous reel-to-reel tape recorder. For a conservative, my old man was always on the cutting edge of the latest gadgetry — despite the fact that at his death, he was almost certainly the only human being left on the planet who still used Word Star.

Screen shot 2013-01-02 at 5.40.13 PM.png

It was a recording of MacBeth. My five-year old brain couldn’t make much sense of it. I asked him finally, ‘What’s eating the queen?’ He explained about the out-out-damned spot business. I replied, ‘Why doesn’t she try Palmolive?’ So began my tutelage with the world’s coolest mentor.

It was on those drives to Sharon that we had some of our best talks. This afternoon, I’ll make one last drive up there to bury him, alongside with his sisters in the little cemetery by the brook. When we held the wake for him some days after he died, I placed inside his casket a few items to see him across the River Styx: his favorite rosary, the TV remote control — private joke — a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes. I can hear her saying, ‘Bill — what is that disgusting substance leaking all over me?’ No pharaoh went off to the afterlife better equipped than he does.

The last time I was with him in Sharon was last October. It was a fundraiser for the local library, billed as ‘A Bevy of Buckleys’ — my dad, Uncle Jim, Aunt Pitts, Aunt Carol, me — reading from the aggregate Buckley oeuvre — a word I first heard from his lips many years ago, along with other exotic, multi-lingual bon mots: mutatis mutandis; pari passu; quod licet Jove, non licet bovi.

An article had appeared in the local paper a few days before, alerting the community to this gala event. As I perused the clipping, my eyes alighted on the sentence: ‘The Buckleys are a well-known American family, William F. Buckley being arguably the best known.’

I kept my amusement to myself, and handed Pup the clipping and waited silently for the reaction I knew would come. Sure enough, within seconds, he looked up with what I would describe as only faintly bemused indignation and said, ‘Ar-guably?’

He was — inarguably — a great man. This is, from a son’s perspective, a mixed blessing, because it means having to share him with the wide world. It was often a very mixed blessing when you were out sailing with him. Great men always have too much canvas up. And great men set out from port in conditions that keep lesser men — such as myself — safe and snug on shore.

One October day in 1997, I arrived from Washington in Stamford for a long-planned overnight sail. As the train pulled into the station, I looked out and saw people hanging onto lampposts at 90-degree angles, trying not to be blown away by the northeast gale that was raging. Indeed, it resembled a scene from The Wizard of Oz. When the train doors opened, I was blown back into the carriage by the 50-mile-an-hour wind. I managed to crawl out onto the platform, practically on all fours, whereupon my father greeted me with a chipper, ‘We’ll have a brisk sail.’

I looked up at him incredulously and said, ‘We’re going out in this?’

Indeed we did go out in it. We always went out in it. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, shrieking at him as the water broke over the cockpit and the boat pitched furiously in boiling seas, ‘Bill – Bill! Why are you trying to kill us?’

But the cries of timorous souls never phased him. He had been going out in it for years, ever since he published his first book, God and Man At Yale. Nor did he need a sailboat to roil the waters. His Royal typewriter — and later, Word Star — would do.

How many words flowed from those keyboards. I went up to Yale recently to inspect his archive of papers. They total 550 linear feet. To put it in perspective, the spire of St. Patrick’s rises 300 feet above us. By some scholarly estimates, he may have written more letters than any other American in history. Add to that prodigal output: 6,000 columns, 1,500 Firing Line episodes, countless articles, over 50 books. He was working on one the day he died.

Jose Martí famously said that a man must do three things in life: write a book, plant a tree, have a son. I don’t know that my father ever planted a tree. Surely whole forests, whole eco-systems, were put to the axe on his account. But he did plant a lot of seeds and many of them, grown to fruition, are here today. Quite a harvest, that.

It’s not easy coming up with an epitaph for such a man. I was tempted by something Mark Twain once said, ‘Homer’s dead, Shakespeare’s dead, and I myself am not feeling at all well.’

Buckleys

Years ago, he gave an interview to Playboy Magazine. Asked why he did this, he couldn’t resist saying, ‘In order to communicate with my 16-year-old son.’ At the end of the interview, he was asked what he would like for an epitaph and he replied, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Only Pup could manage to work the Book of Job into a Hugh Hefner publication.

I finally settled on one, and I’ll say the words over his grave at sunset today in Sharon, as we lay him to rest. They’re from a poem he knew well — Robert Louis Stevenson’s Requiem – each line of which, indeed, seemed to have been written just for him:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live, and gladly die.
And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

__________

Christopher Buckley’s eulogy for his father, William F. Buckley.

William F. Buckley

The Undiscovered Country

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Literature, Philosophy

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Shakespeare

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

__________

The famous soliloquy from the first scene of act three in Hamlet.

Here are Rabbi David Wolpe and Christopher Hitchens citing staves from this scene in their debate on the question of the afterlife. I’ve pasted the video here at the point just prior to when Hamlet gets brought into the mix, as it’s Sam Harris making a very interesting (and very relevant) point about our fear of death and how a parent could ever find consolation in the loss of a child.

 

For the record, I take issue with Harris’s implied point; namely, I think it’s death that is actually more upsetting — as an idea — than merely dying. The latter is a temporary moment of life, actually a part of our experience of the world. The former is not. As Larkin wrote, “Not to be here, not to be anywhere“: that’s what’s so horrifying to us. In his novel Metroland, Julian Barnes echoes this exact sentiment when he asserts, “I wouldn’t mind dying at all, as long as I didn’t end up dead at the end of it.” You have to admire the logic of the idea, as well as Barnes’s subtle repetition of the word end. But I’m getting carried away again…

By the way, if you want the No Fear Shakespeare version of the above soliloquy, it’s:

To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream.
Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep
who knows what kind of dreams might come,
After we’ve put the noise and commotion of life
behind us. That’s certainly something to worry
about. That’s the consideration that makes us
stretch out our sufferings so long.
After all, who would put up with all life’s
humiliations—the abuse from superiors, the
insults of arrogant men, the pangs of
unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal
system, the rudeness of people in office, and
the mistreatment good people have to take
from bad—when you could simply take out
your knife and call it quits? Who would choose
to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life,
unless they were afraid of something dreadful
after death, the undiscovered country from
which no visitor returns, which we wonder
about without getting any answers from and
which makes us stick to the evils we know
rather than rush off to seek the ones we
don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards,
and our natural boldness becomes weak with
too much thinking. Actions that should be
carried out at once get misdirected, and stop
being actions at all.

The Rustle of a Wing

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Speeches

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Robert Ingersoll

“Dear friends: I am going to do that which the dead oft promised he would do for me.

The loved and loving brother and friend, died where manhood’s morning almost touches noon, and while the shadows still were falling toward the west.

He had not passed on life’s highway the stone that marks the highest point; but being weary for a moment, he lay down by the wayside, and using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love with life and raptured with the world, he passed to silence and pathetic dust.

Yet, after all, it may be best, just in the happiest, sunniest hour of all the voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail, to dash against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar above a sunken ship. For whether in mid-sea or ‘mong the breakers of the farther shore, a wreck at last must mark the end of each and all. And every life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy as sad and deep and dark as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death.

This brave and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock; but in the sunshine he was vine and flower. He was the friend of all heroic souls. He climbed the heights, and left all superstitions far below, while on his forehead fell the golden dawning of a grander day.

He loved the beautiful, and was with color, form, and music touched to tears. He sided with the weak, the poor, and wronged, and lovingly gave alms. With loyal heart and with the purest hands he faithfully discharged all public trusts.

He was a worshiper of liberty, a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote these words: ‘For Justice all place a temple, and all season, summer.’ He believed that happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. He added to the sum of human joy; and were every one to whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep tonight beneath a wilderness of flowers.

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, ‘I am better now.’ Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.

The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet, unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.

And now, to you, who have been chosen, from among the many men he loved, to do the last sad office for the dead, we give his sacred dust.

Speech cannot contain our love. There was, there is, no gentler, stronger, manlier man.”

__________

Robert Ingersoll’s eulogy for his brother, Ebon C. Ingersoll.

I post these words in honor of the memory of GCL, a nineteen-year-old family friend who was struck by a train and killed two days ago. Certainly there is nothing that can assuage a loss like that, but if any words can hope to pay tribute to a young man’s life, they are these spoken by Robert Ingersoll as an elegy to his young brother.

In my view, only Shakespeare rises to this level of sublimity in bringing some measure of honor to the tragic passing of a young man. In Act 3, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is thus described:

When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

In Act 5 of Macbeth, Ross must tell Siward that his son, Young Siward, has just been violently slain. Ross says,

He only lived but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.

Your cause of grief
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.

Old Siward ponders the tragic news, and replies:

Why then, God’s soldier be he…
And so, God be with him
Here comes newer comfort.

Let us hope that that newer comfort finds this particular family, today, also.