Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by in Biography

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John Updike

“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance…

In church this morning, as I half-listened to the Christmas hymns and the reading of the very unlikely, much-illustrated passage from Luke telling how Gabriel came to Mary and told her that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and the power of the Highest would ‘overshadow’ her and make her pregnant with the Son of God, it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”

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Excerpted from the impeccable final chapter “On Being a Self Forever” in John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this multifaceted, beautifully written book. Among modern American writers, Updike is perhaps the best known for his prolific output: in looking at his CV, it seems he published a book every month — and a poem every morning along with two essays and a review each afternoon. This unsurpassable fluency and energy come through in the superb writing and versatility of Self-Consciousness. It’s a memoir that covers a lot of ground, effortlessly.

Though I like the biographical narrative of Self-Consciousness, it’s these ruminative asides — profound and deeply personal — that make the book so special. You can read more below.

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Why Harold Bloom Quit Writing for Academics

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Interview

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Harold Bloom

“I had so deep a revulsion, as I still do, against what was happening in the academies of supposed ‘higher’ education that eventually it drove me out of teaching graduate students altogether. It drove me out of the English department at Yale — I became a department of one. And I increasingly said, ‘I don’t want to write for these people.’

I’m not interested in ideologies, whether of the left or of the right. That has nothing to do with what I love. That has nothing to do with Shakespeare. I don’t want anything to do with that. I don’t want to take part in this madness in which sexual orientation, ethic identity, skin pigmentation, gender is deemed to be the most crucial element in apprehending a poet, or a playwright, or a story writer, or a novelist, or even an essayist. I couldn’t bear that anymore and so I started to write books for the widest possible public.”

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Pulled from Bloom’s 2011 interview with The New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus.

Go on:

Winston Churchill: The Simple, Complex Man

27 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in History

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winston-churchill31

“All who were with him then agree that the Old Man had more important matters on his mind than the sensitive feelings of subordinates. In any event, in time they came to adore him. Jock Colville later recalled, ‘Churchill had a natural sympathy for simple people, because he himself took a simple view of what was required; and he hated casuistry. That was no doubt why the man-in-the-street loved him and the intellectuals did not.’ Churchill, for his part, considered those on the left who anointed themselves the arbiters of right and wrong to be arrogant, ‘a fault,’ Colville recalled, Churchill ‘detested in others, particularly in its intellectual form.’ For that reason, Churchill ‘had dislike and contempt, of a kind which transcended politics, of the intellectual wing of the Labour party,’ which in turn despised Churchill. In 1940 the intellectualism of the left was inimical to Churchill and to Britain’s cause, which was simplicity itself: defeat Hitler.

Churchill cared little for obtuse political or social theories; he was a man of action: state the problem, find a solution, and solve the problem. For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading — from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay — he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study, The Life of the White Ant. ‘Socialism,’ Churchill declared, ‘would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.’ Case closed. Almost a decade later, when the Labour Party, then in power, nationalized British industries one by one, and when paper, meat, gasoline, and even wood for furniture were still rationed, Churchill commented: ‘The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queuetopia.'”

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Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More of the Old Man:

Winston Churchill

“We Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye” by Anna Akhmatova

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Poetry

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Anna Akhmatova

We don’t know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You’re moody, and I am your shadow.
Let’s step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.

That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

__________

“We Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye” by Ukrainian poet Anna Akhmatova.

It’s tricky to read poetry in translation. Unlike literature, poetry is contingent on the subtle turn of le mot juste; one slip up, one elbow sticking out or awkward foot, and the whole thing jangles. English-speakers are lucky: we are heirs to perhaps the finest poetical tradition. As E.M. Forster said, the English novel is not superior. It fears the Russian novel, the French novel, and some might claim the Spanish novel, but English poetry fears no one.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker, Martin Amis mused on this subject, saying, “[I]t was fashionable to say in the seventies and eighties that Russian literature had a kind of tension and high-stakes feel about it because it was always a question of life and death, and not just during the Soviet period. Dostoevsky was imprisoned, as well. The stakes were high. Akhmatova: ‘It loves blood the Russian earth.’ This gives some sort of weight to their literature.” Amis continued, noting how this relates to British writing, “But look at English literature… It is the greatest body of poetry the world has yet known. And completely not dependent on horror and bloodshed. So, I am proud of that. I am proud of being from the same country as Shakespeare.”

The Seven Ages of Man

04 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Literature, Speeches

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William ShakespeareAll the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

____

The renowned British historian Robert Conquest took this famous stave and reshaped it into limerick form, distilling man’s seven ages into five lines…

   Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps’ rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

__________

Two versions of man’s “seven ages,” once from Shakespeare’s As You Like Itand the other from the great Robert Conquest.

My friend M. likes to throw out — usually at the tail end of some long, drawn-out, boozy dinner — another of Conquest’s coarse verse:

There once was a bastard called Lenin
Who did one or two million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Not bad for the author of The Great Terror and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Featured Like Him

19 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Literature

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ShakespeareWhen in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

__________

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

The Bard was envious. The greatest writer who ever breathed, the one that stands now in immortal isolation above the literary world, coveted another’s talent — he found himself “desiring this man’s art”.

Sonnet 29 is a poem that we would all be the richer having memorized. Not only is it musically flawless, it tells of something both unsettling and reassuring: the apparent envy and inner-struggle of the great Shakespeare. Here is a man who troubles “deaf heaven” with hopeless prayers, bemoaning his “outcast state” as one always in want of the appearance (“featured like him”), the freedoms (“scope”), and the friendships of other men. He even envied the craft, the artistic gifts, of another. Only one question could arise here: who in the world did Shakespeare see as more gifted than himself?

I have to know the answer.

As an aside: it’s interesting that the sonnet ends on a note of hope. In thinking about the love of the poem’s addressee, Shakespeare emerges like a lark from his sunken state, filled with hope enough to scorn to change places with a prince. So Shakespeare, who was a Protestant (though some interesting textual evidence suggests he was a closet-Catholic), transcends the torment of melancholy through the plain solution of earthly love, rather than the salvation offered by a deaf sky.

Something to consider.

“High Country Weather” by James K. Baxter

20 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Poetry

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Raleigh's Farm

Alone we are born
And die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

__________

“High Country Weather” by James K. Baxter.

James Baxter is a hero in his homeland of New Zealand, and apparently these are well-known lines among Australians and New Zealanders — the people my dad continually declares he’ll be joining, if, for the foreseeable future, the United States continues its long economic slide. (For the record: he’s been saying this for several years now.)

Baxter was a convert to Christianity, a fact which must change one’s reading of the shattering lines, “Alone we are born/ And die alone.” For those are not the words of a Christian; after all, God’s presence is forever immediate. He will never leave you nor forsake you.

But then again, Shakespeare through Hamlet asked, “To be or not to be?” And even though a Christian can never not be, the question is still real and haunting, just like the words of High Country Weather.

The picture was taken at my friend Raleigh’s farm in Virginia.