I've had a very difficult time keeping up with my blogs in this class. This has been an interesting semester for me. I wouldn't necessarily say that it has been a dry spell, but it has been a time when I've been absorbing a lot of information from a lot of different places and I've had a lot of trouble coming up with things to say on my own. I've also been having troubles with reading my secondary criticism. Shakespeare After All is an interesting book, but I've gotten so much more enjoyment just from reading the bard himself. I'm one of those people who is very convinced that the meaning of the story is the story, and I hate when everything has to have a moral. I don't like the way literary criticism tries to find a meaning in everything. I prefer to read the story just to find out what happens, and not to think about how it teaches us about what we should do. And I hate stories that blatantly tell you the moral at the end. That's dogma, not writing. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind if a story teaches me something. I think that's essential. I just don't like when the cute fluffy moral gets shoved down my throat. It gets stuck and then I choke. That's never fun.
And besides, Shakespeare does not tell us anything in any of his stories. It is the characters that speak, and not out of a desire to teach us, to inspire us, or even (for most of them) to entertain us, as they do not know that we watch from the other side of the curtain. Likewise, we go about our own daily tasks, and only the most moon-struck (some might use the word crazy here) think that anyone is watching us. And yet who can say that they are not? Who dares say that we are not the rude mechanicals, poorly acting out a role put on for the amusement of others, and yet pretending that we are the most important thing in the world?
Maybe this is just me being sad again. The worst part of that is, as sad as I am, I don't think that I fully understand the tragic sense of life yet. I've been trying. It is definitely a struggle. There are so many sad things that go on every day, and I know that I only hear a tenth of a millionth of them. Even in reading Shakespeare I feel I have only tasted the foam from the top of a glass frothing over with tragedy. I'm slowly being wooed to the place where I should be. And yet I find myself running to embrace the comedic side of life as Shakespeare sees it, the continuity and continuation of the social realm. But then I do so love reading a good tragedy! I think the problem is that people are so afraid of getting hurt that they only want to see bad things happen to other people.
Then again, I've always been the kind of person who hates seeing other people get hurt (the ones I care about, at least). The best way for me, then, to embrace this tragedy is by reading and writing these sorts of terrible things, because I don't want to see it in real life. It's a bit of a conundrum and it's been hard for me to figure out even what it means to embrace the tragic. I don't even know whether I will really know if the tragic sense if life embraces me; perhaps it will be a moment of epiphany, but perhaps, as has happened so often in my life, the realization will sneak up on me before I even know that it is there, and I will just wake up one morning and see things differently.
As difficult as this semester has been for me (in general), I have still learned a lot. Right now I feel as though I am a sponge, soaking up as much brilliance as I can until I am over-saturated with it and cannot help but spill words onto the page. Someday I will find the words to express just how much Shakespeare has changed me, but for now I am but tongue-tied at his brilliance and am left as lost for words as Lavinia. So I will leave you, once again, with a quote, this one from C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle.
"The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."
