I'm
reading Shakespeare again now, fifty years after having “read”
him in school and passed the examinations. And the thought that most
often comes through my mind as I now read Macbeth, Lear, Antony and
Cleopatra, is that making a young student's career and livelihood
dependent upon passing a test on Shakespeare, before the student has
had the experience to understand it, has to do more damage than good.
"My
desolation does begin to make a better life. 'Tis paltry to be
Caesar,” says Cleopatra.
That is what my brother would call “a
hard teaching,” and if I tried teaching it in a high school, the
parents would demand my immediate firing. “We don't want our child
to be a hippie, that's not why we're paying your salary.”
Impossible.
So what is a teacher to do? Falsify what Shakespeare is really
saying, of course, all the while praising him to the skies.
I
have often felt that I was lucky that I wasn't jailed nor assassinated for such truth as I was able to teach and to live.
There were a few close calls, such as when I refused to go to
Viet-Nam and when I was working as a sociologist in Alabama in the
1960's and Massachusetts in the 1970's. I received what some might say were analogous punishments but not those.
A
Russian friend who was jailed and tortured in the 1950's in the
Soviet Union for speaking and living the truth says that being put in
solitary confinement was nothing, but being put in an asylum with
genuinely crazy people was very hard to take.
I
feel even luckier to have known such people, even to know of them, than
to have escaped jail or assassination. Thinking of Norman Morrison,
as I often do, still is breath-taking for me – it literally affects
my breathing.
Hey Val. I've read all of the 9 blogs you've posted up until now but this one stuck in my mind because of the Shakespeare quote about desolation being the beginning of a better life. I wouldn't second guess Shakespeare; I figure he knew human nature, knew what he was talking about. In fact I think it's a common experience that being desolated is the start of something good, something better. You hear it said in different ways and it doesn't take much reflection to recognize it's true. Of course you don't look for desolation in order to start a better life, but once you are struck down, so to speak, and know desolation, it should help you get moving again to realize that you're on the way to something better than before. Yet it's so hard to take in that truth and be conforted by it. Now can you explain that Val?! Maybe you just get blinded by the hurt of being devastated?
ReplyDeleteRuth, thank you. I will give your question about why it is such a "hard teaching" a lot of thought and hope to come up with something helpful. Right at this moment, I think of that book by St. John of the Cross, on "The Dark Night of the Soul" and its benefits, even its necessity.
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