Zizek, Pandemic, and World War I

Zizek, who has very quickly produced a book called Pandemic!, noted in an interview that the Covid crisis is a combination of 1918 (pandemic), 1932 (economic collapse), and 1968 (social unrest) all rolled into one. He also stated:

The life that they knew will not return. Both the left and the right don’t understand the reality of the epidemic, and refuse to accept the full consequences of it.

As  people are looking backwards for parallels as they look forward to possible futures, I feel inclined to jump into the fray.  World War I keeps popping into my mind--in other words, 1914--as a frame of reference, a touchstone year, more so than 1918, 1932, or 1968.

As historian David Stevenson writes in 2014 in "World War I and the 'Short War Illusion,'" when World War I began in 1914, there were runs on the British banking system and panic food buying, but many people thought the war would be over quickly--by late autumn or Christmas. Even after the war became literally entrenched, many clung to the hope it would soon end, what Stevenson calls "wishful thinking." Military commanders who knew the war would last longer hoped it would not last more than 18 months to two years and did not anticipate the catastrophic death rate.

An opulent way of life that had lasted many decades ended with World War I.

What interests me most about the World War I era--let us say 1914-1918, though 1920 might be a better end date--is how much life changed. As I was researching my Bonhoeffer book, I became aware of an endless trail of upper and middle class European lament about a culture that had been destroyed by the war, a world that to many seemed unshakeable. Interestingly and frustratingly, these laments assumed that none of what changed needed to be explained.

 This nostalgic mourning goes on for decades and is captured in Jean Renoir's 1938 film about World War I, The Grand Illusion, a movie anachronistic now but wildly embraced at the time. It paints a flattering, idealized, and nostalgic picture of international upper class solidarity and shared values from a "lost time" viewed through highly rose-colored classes. The idea that somehow life would spring back to "normal"--ie, the prewar model that was desirable for people of privilege--seems to have persisted up to about 1950.

The Grand Illusion: A nostalgic and idealized view of the World War I world.

I became interested in this, too, because of the unexplained evidences of change that occurred, say, in the life of Virgina Woolf. Before the war, she (and after her marriage, she and Leonard) lived comfortably on her inherited income. The money she earned writing book reviews was, before her marriage, her "mad" money, to be spent as she willed. She and her siblings, before her marriage, took months-long holidays  in the English countryside, repeating the pattern they grew up with, traveled to Europe, maintained homes with servants in downtown London, and seemed to do all of this financially effortlessly. By 1920, however, money has become a much more acute problem: the Woolfs needed Virginia's review income to live, trips to Europe were curtailed, and very tight budgets had become the order of the day. As Jane Harrison put it, the 1920s Woolfs were as "poor as rats."

In a fine, engaging new biography of Edith Nesbitt (The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbitt, by Eleanor Fitzsimon), much of what happened is spelled out in more detail. Though children's author Nesbitt continued to produce her books, money seemed to evaporate after 1914 to the point that this enterprising and always romantic minded woman was organizing growing and selling flowers at the end of her front yard (on a well-travelled route) and growing vegetables to survive.

While happened between 1914-18 was hyperinflation. At a certain point, the British government, completely broke but needing to finance a costly war, simply resorted to printing money. The country was supposedly on the gold standard, but, out of resources, it bought armaments with paper that had no gold to back it up. This led to rapid inflation as cash with literally no value flooded into the society. The inherited incomes that once sustained comfortable lives lost purchase power--and never fully recovered.  The trauma was so deep and widespread that nobody at the time needed to explain it: it was understood. 

On the principle that reality imitates art, I keep thinking of Dr. Zhivago. The Russian Revolution was the direct outcome of a wealthy and out of touch, utterly incompetent wannabe strongman  (Czar Nicholas II's) mismanagement of World War I. A fraud like Rasputin is not so far off from the "advisors" around our great leader today. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II, and Donald Trump are the result of putting an out-of-touch elite in charge and allowing reality to take a back seat to wishful fantasies. 

Right now, we are in a moment when, as in 1914, we think this crisis will pass quickly. From the resurgence of disease the reopening is causing, it seems instead that the pandemic might be the beginning of something that will last far longer than we think.

Adding to stress, Covid is coming on top of the fact that in the U.S. we haven't recovered yet (not for the average person) from the 2008 stock market crash. Many of us have been longing for the pre-2008 world to reemerge, or to use a better metaphor, for the ship drifting off course for 12 years  to get turned back so it can start steaming toward that distant shore. Now it looks like that ship has been blown by hurricane a thousand miles the other way. 

On the other hand, life is endlessly surprising--and as a friend says, this is a moment to live in the Now and appreciate all it has to offer. On the positive side too, if old systems come tumbling down, we have a chance to build a more earth-friendly world, one that may make our carbon-based present economy seem as barbaric (and unnecessary)  as the slave owning past. It is also worth noting that the pre-World War I had a belief in progress that the war undid: maybe our own crisis will undo persistent dystopic visioning and show that life can get better.

L'ecriture humaine: Hamlet's pacifist subtext: two kings' fight for land

In Act I scene 1 of Hamlet, Shakespeare's begins his startling pacifist subtext. Part of what makes the opening so ominous is Claudius' war preparation. The two palace guards stand uneasy on dark, eery, misty castle ramparts late at night, knowing that the world is changing but not what any of it means. They realize that the more powerfully connected Horatio will have information. When he arrives, they ask him about the feverish arms build up while hoping that he will validate the existence of a ghost.

Horatio explains the background. Fortinbras, king of Norway, dared Hamlet (Hamlet's father), king of Denmark, to hand-to-hand combat over a piece of land. The loser was to forfeit the contested territory. King Hamlet won by killing King Fortinbras. Now, however, that both kings are dead, Fortinbras' son Fortinbras is marching with an army to avenge his father and regain the small territory. 

This is a remarkable story, one that seems a fantasia. How often have people asked: why not save all the suffering and bloodshed of war by having the leaders of two countries fight to settle a dispute? The thinking is that if they had to risk their own lives, world leaders would be less likely to jump into conflicts. Beyond that, how much easier, how much less horrible, to have disputes settled this way? 

Here, Shakespeare gives full reign to this fantasy as part of the play's prehistory.

David' Oath of the Horatii shows the mourning of the women.

While there are no modern equivalents to two kings settling a dispute through hand-to-hand combat, there is an ancient one of proxy warfare. Livy tells the story of the Roman king and the Sabine dictator deciding to avoid a war through a fight to the death between six of their warriors. The Romans send out their three Horatii to fight the three Sabine Curiatii. Rome wins.  The peace lasts as long as a peace usually does.

Moving back to Hamlet we learn, too, in these early scenes, that Hamlet's ghost is suffering terrible torments in purgatory as his sins are burned away. If he were allowed to speak of them, he tells Hamlet, the torments  would stand Hamlet's hair on end. This offer a contrasting portrait of his father from the one Hamlet presents. Hamlet describes his father as  a Hyperion--a sun god--in contrast to the oversexed, animalistic "satyr" of Claudius. Yet Hamlet senior's own testimony suggests he has much to atone for--while at the same time, perhaps it is commendable when a king, unable to repent of sins before death, ends up in purgatory rather than hell.

By the end of the play, Hamlet has achieved an inner peace. What he considers his miraculous escape from death at the hands of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in England leads him to believe that a benign God has the world in his hands. For the first time, Hamlet rests easy. He tells Horatio:

...  our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—

The deep plots that do pall or pale or fail are Claudius' against Hamlet. God, Hamlet thinks, is on his side and protecting him. He does not, as people don't when God' grace seems to fall on them, question why God would favor them but kill others. Hamlet doesn't wonder that God allows Rosencrantz or Guildenstern--or for that matter his own father--to die. His own sense of divine protection is enough.

Hamlet does not kill Claudius until he realizes Claudius has poisoned Gertrude by letting her drink from the poisoned chalice meant for Hamlet. As it has been throughout the play, only the threat Claudius poses to his mother can motivate Hamlet to kill a fellow royal.

A subversively peaceful subtext run through Hamlet. Two kings fight to the death over a piece of land to spare their armies the bloody cost of battle. A prince who loves his murdered father loathes the idea of avenging his death. When this prince tries to use the example of a fellow prince marching on his country to inspire himself to revenge, he ends, instead, profoundly questioning waging a war for something as fragile as honor. Being a prince, Hamlet is inherently a dangerous individual because of the power put into his hands. At the same time, the soul of this prince, self-deluded as it is, longs for peace. Through him, Shakespeare encourages us to question vengeance, warfare, and privilege--and to dream of a world in which princes would fight for land themselves rather than putting armies in the field.

L'ecriture humaine: Hamlet's pacifist subtext and the problem of the prince

I held off posting this because it seemed frivolous against the George Floyd killing, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood Shakespeare's meditation on the relationship between murder and power is relevant for our times. Floyd's killer had too  much power to kill with impunity. Floyd, like those Hamlet killed, was dehumanized. 

Hamlet as a character doesn't cohere in ways I would like.  

In Hamlet's character, Shakespeare created, on the one hand, an introspective, sensitive, and humane prince who deeply questions and critiques the revenge and war ethic. By doing so, Shakespeare played a double game in this play, writing a revenge tragedy that would satisfy his audience's desire for bloodlust while at the same time undermining the bloodlust ethic.

This Delacroix painting captures the reality of Polonius as a person.

Yet while Hamlet is his vehicle for critiquing violence, Hamlet turns into a heartless killer. Hamlet murders Polonius, mistaking him for Claudius as he hides behind a tapestry ("arras")  in Gertrude's room.  Later, Hamlet orchestrates the deaths of courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Why, one wonders, did Shakespeare turn revenge-averse Hamlet into a murderer?

Notably,  Hamlet does not have a problem killing people of lower rank. His hesitancy comes into play only when it is a matter of killing a person of his own status.

Hamlet is callous towards both Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In terms of Polonius's murder, it is possible that Hamlet, who has most likely hallucinated, rather than actually seen, Claudius' ghost in Gertrude's room, is half mad at the moment he strikes, hardly knowing what he is doing.

Yet even the calmer Hamlet disparages rather than shows compassion for the dead courier. In Act three, scene 4, he says to Gertrude:

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room. ... Indeed this counselor... was in life a foolish prating knave.

Hamlet contrasts Polonius' still serenity in death to his foolish chatter in life. By doing so,  Hamlet implies Polonius is better off dead. He also, at this moment, implies he will deal harshly and cold-bloodedly towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are accompanying him to England--even though he notes they are childhood companions, individuals he knows and for whom one might imagine he would feel some empathy. He states, however, that he plans to punish them for being the willing tools of Claudius, hoisting them with their own petard:

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer/Hoist with his own petard. And ’t shall go hard

In Act V, scene 2, having returned from his off scene trip, he explains to Horatio how he tricked the two courtiers. He opened and read the letter Claudius sent with them in their pouch. In the letter, unbeknownst to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Claudius called for Hamlet to be immediately beheaded upon landing on English soil. Hamlet, who has his father's royal signet ring with him, rewrites the letter to turn the tables: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be killed, without even time to "shrive" or repent of their sins, but be put to "sudden death."

In ruminating about this, Hamlet says that the two courtiers are "not near my conscience." They deserve what they get, he says, because they "made love" to their profession. Essentially, he is indifferent to their deaths. He argues that they brought it on themselves:

Their defeat /Does by their own insinuation grow.

He states that when "baser" natures come between "mighty opposites" they get what they deserve. 

Ironically, this images affirms the humanity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, something Hamlet cannot do. 

In having Hamlet say that he and Claudius are mighty opposites amid baser people, Shakespeare highlights the problems and psychopathy of princedom, as well as the strong identity Hamlet feels with Claudius that his conscious mind wants to deny. Hamlet might hesitate to kill someone as royal as he is--and he might hesitate to sacrifice an army to gain a small conquest--but he shows his ruthless belief in his royal prerogative to kill when it comes to the little people around him.

Why would Shakespeare do this? One argument might be that  he wants to show that Hamlet is deteriorating as the play goes on. Hamlet moves from passion killing to coldblooded murder, plotted as Claudius might have done, because the disease and corruption of the Danish court has started to infect him. 

But another, more compelling answer is suggested by Tolstoy, who, writing not about Shakespeare but the artist in general, asserts in Anna Karenina that the true artist is:

inspired directly by what is within the soul, without caring whether what is painted [or written] will belong to any recognized school [genre].

Shakespeare did clearly care about genre. But he went deeper than genre, as Tolstoy did, telling the truth as he saw it. A truth he knew--and makes clear in many of his plays--is that princes are inherently dangerous. Shakespeare uses Hamlet the prince to articulate what is within his writer's soul--a distaste for revenge and violence and a belief that the powerful, buttressed by ideologies of bloodlines and far too much power, are inherently dangerous. In Hamlet, Shakespeare leaves us with a dilemma: those with the most power to end the violence plaguing humankind are those most hardwired to justify their own use of violence. In this ragged, brilliant play, Shakespeare makes us uneasy by raising more questions than answers.

L'Ecriture Humaine: Schitt's Creek as the humane

“The essence of egalitarianism is rejection of the idea that one person has the right to exercise power over another.” Samuel Huntington 

"It didn't matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music.” Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts. 

Much of the series' action takes place in the Cafe Tropical, which is very much like the restaurants I know in my rural area. In fact, although the setting is deliberately vague, I was sure it was set in rural Ohio, evidence of how well the show nails small town life today.

I wrote earlier about the series Schittt's Creek as pastoral: (https://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2020/04/journal-of-plague-year-schitts-creek-as.html). Now that I have finished all six seasons, I would like to laud the show in more general terms: I simply can't recommend it too highly. Lara Zarum, writing for The New York Times, sums it up as:

Sweet but never saccharine, the show has tracked the evolution of the Roses — who arrived in Schitt’s Creek full of disdain, with nothing but the couture on their backs — as they’ve been absorbed into the tiny town in the boonies

The formerly wealthy Roses, Johnny, Moira, and their adult children David and Alexis, come to love their adopted home, a sharp contrast to some of their snobbish friends back east. The Roses mature (or renew in the case of the older generation).  They thrive as the family grows closer. They also grow as individuals in their new and humbler home. The series has a special resonance for me as I made a similar move with my family to small town America 12 years ago. I also have been changed by the experience in profound and positive ways. I can connect with Catherine O'Hara, who plays family matriarch Moira, when she says of the series' characters, "it's like we're aliens learning to be humans." I too learned to become more human--and humane--living in a new and quieter place.

 I am delighted this show got off the ground and has become a slo-mo hit. A documentary at the end of season six highlights, too, what I hadn't fully noticed: that the series has become a beacon to the LGBTQ community because of its matter-of-fact depiction of a loving relationship between two men as something natural, not angst-ridden. I found it heart-warming on the documentary to see the show's embrace by the LGBTQ community.

Patrick (Noah Reid) and David (Daniel Levy) have a loving relationship.  

The community and family support David and Patrick in a very natural way. 

I also registered the degree to which the fan devotion depicted in the documentary shows a hunger for kindness. And this gets to the heart of the show. It has been nominated for four Emmys, is beautifully acted and scripted, and thoughtful in developing characters, but the main point is its modeling of  kindness and compassion--and a profound equalitarianism--in human relations. It is an exemplar of l'ecriture humaine. And all of this is managed in a non-syrupy way that nonetheless can bring a tear to the eye.

Notably, according to Zarum, the series was turned down by all the U.S. broadcast and cable networks before the producers were able to "cobble together" funding from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting) with a distribution agreement from Europe's ITV Studios. "Finally," as Zarum says, a word that can be read as a sigh, Pop, a U.S. for-pay television channel signed on.

Moira (Catherine O'Hara) in town hall. One of my surprises was finding out that the clothing, which I had thought was an overtop parody of designer clothing, was actual designer clothing, another evidence that the rich are not like you and me. The program budgeted for couture fashion to avoid having to tell people in every episode that the Roses had fallen from wealth.

I am not surprised that all the major US outlets refused the series: in fact, I would have been surprised if it were otherwise. The innate, gentle humanity of the show would be anathema to the backers of such psychopathically hard-hearted mini-series as "Game of Thrones" and "West World" or some of the cruel sitcoms out there. Yet, as is so often the case, marginalization was a boon for the show. The series developed under the radar, largely unnoticed--as if, in fact, the Levys were in Schitt's Creek. As Zarum notes:

Levy says the show’s distance from the Hollywood hoopla gives him a certain level of freedom as a storyteller. “We operate very much in an isolated bubble up in Canada,” he said. 

I copy below four New York Times' commenters' comments, all surprisingly non-acerbic for the Times:

"I'm so obsessed with the show that I had a "Fold in the Cheese!" apron made up for holiday cooking. I found it marvelously funny from the first episode, but what caught me off guard is how I first cried at the end of Season 2, which turned to occasional blubbering in Season 3, and now I'm often a mess watching the stories unfold.
The very rare program that lets the characters grow in a natural and organic way, but retains each of their very distinct personalities and quirks as they expand to become more fully realized people.
It's also extremely significant because it's the first example I can remember in any television or film program that accurately depicts an LGBT romance/relationship as they so often are in real life...no big deal. There is no exaggeration, no heightened parody, no big statements. Just people being people and those around them embracing them for it. The portrayal is long overdue and means the world to so many of us." John 

 Honestly, this show has saved our sanity as we turn from the insanity of our politics and fear and tune in to this wonderful series.  This past season was poignant, heartfelt and just magical...I talk this show up to everyone who will listen to me.  We will miss them. Darby Stevens 

 “The show really has gotten us through the darkest time I can remember in our politics, and I'm Catherine O'Hara's age [60s].  Maybe we'll survive after all." Neenee

“The show is superbly written, no wasted dialog, respectful of each character, exquisitely funny and no inane laugh track to tell is what to think." Mike

The Roses live in a motel. One of my students, also down on her luck though she had not ever fallen from wealth, lived in a very similar hotel. I would drive her home after class because although she had recently had brain surgery (fortunately she had Medicaid) and could easily get dizzy and fall down, she could not afford a car. In other words, how the Roses end up living, though it can seem fantastic, is reality for many Americans--though most don't have the Roses' background. 

The series is an example of how l'ecriture humaine transcends the snobbish. Using Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, and EM Forster as exemplars of l'ecriture humaine can leave the false impression that this kind of writing is only the province of a certain type of literature and only for a certain kind of person, when nothing could be further from the truth. Part of this project is to go past pretty wrappings to the core of what a humane literature and media is.

Twyla (Sarah Levy) and Moira in the Tropical Cafe. The Levy family is responsible for the series and three of them, including Sarah, star in it.

Past blogs have shown that a l'ecriture humaine highlights the domestic, the circular, the point-of-view of the underdog, the empathetic, the rejection of ritual humiliation, and the equalitarian. Schitt's Creek has all of these attributes. What especially moves me is its radical equalitarianism--unlike a show such as Downtown Abbey, which celebrates a hierarchical society, there is no hierarchical pecking order in Schitt's Creek. We even learn something at the end about Twyla, the waitress, that makes it impossible to slot her into a 'lesser' category. When this ending first emerged, I thought it ludicrous, then realized it is a part of the radical vision of the show, which consciously or not,  creates a world where all people are equal. Pastoral and visionary literature thus merge.

Some will possibly reject the series for a few disgusting or raunchy gags, especially at the beginning. That would be a mistake in my opinion, but to each their own.

L'Ecriture Humaine: Hamlet's pacifist subtext

For a society in desperate need of rediscovering its moral center, Shakespeare stands out as a key articulator of human decency.  Yet though Shakespeare's humanity sometimes leaps from his work,  sometimes it is obscured. Hamlet, for example, a highly jagged, problematic play, veils its critique of revenge and war. The long version we have--four and half hours performed in its entirety--reflects Shakespeare's struggles, never-resolved, with this play's contradictions.

Hamlet is ripped apart as the play opens with grief over his father's death, angered and stunned at his mother's quick remarriage, and thrown into horror by his father's ghost's revelations.  In an overt reading, Hamlet enacts justice when he finally kills his father's --and mother's--cold-blooded murderer. Yet alternative ideas about revenge can be found  through the stories embedded within Hamlet that take us winding into the classical world in a way that undermines an overt reading. 

Two stories alluded to in the play highlight two possible responses to vengeance. In the first, in Act II, scene ii, Hamlet chats with the players who arrive at the castle. He starts a speech given about Pyrrhus, Achilles' son. Pyrrhus, entering the Trojan horse as part of the ploy to defeat Troy, is out for vengeance anyway he can get it, and his description in Hamlet lives up to his bloodthirsty reputation. 

European paintings heroize Pyrrhus, though modern readers often speculate that he was literature's first psychopath. Here, in a detail from an urn that is called "Pyrrhus kills Priam" we see the slaughter of Trojan women and children that was part of Pyrrhus' murderous rampage. I have not found, however, an image of him coated in bloody  gore baked onto his body or with blazing red eyes.  

Pyrrhus has coated himself in the thick, congealed blood of the dead: fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. Further, he has lit fires in the streets to bake and paste the thick layer of blood to his flesh. He is "roasted in wrath and fire." He has been made larger with the bloody gore he has pasted to himself, and his eyes burn like red stones. This is a terrifying and dehumanized picture of rage and bloodlust:

Now is he total gules, horridly tricked/With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, /Baked and impasted with the parching streets, /That lend a tyrannous and damnèd light, /And thus o'ersizèd with coagulate gore, /With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus /Old grandsire Priam seeks.

The First Player then picks up the story and describes  how the merciless "tyrant" Pyrrhus, driven by fury, hacks the hapless Priam to death, dishonoring his body:

Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide, /But with the whiff and wind of his fell swordThe unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium, /Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top /Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
 /Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear. For, lo, his sword, /Which was declining on the milky head /Of reverend Priam, seemed i' th' air to stick. /So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood ...

This is a picture of mad revenge. 

The second allusion to revenge comes when Hamlet asks Polonius in Act III scene 2, as they are getting ready to watch the Mousetrap play, if he has ever acted. Polonius says that as a university student:  “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’the capitol/Brutus killed me.” This foreshadows Polonius' death at the hands of Hamlet. But it also brings to mind Brutus’s father. This elder Brutus was murdered despite having been promised safe passage after surrendering to Pompey. The younger Brutus, the friend of Caesar,  never avenges his father’s death. He believes it would be better for Rome to let revenge go and put the needs of his country ahead of of the "dishonor" of his private domestic situation. 

Since Hamlet will later enact the role of Brutus in killing Polonius, he is explicitly identified with Brutus--a figure who does not enact revenge. 

Hamlet looks beyond the arras to see the body of Polonius, who he has just accidentally killed. 

Hamlet himself is a problematic character. Critics have often depicted him as the figure of indecision, while others, such as Rene Girard in The Theater of Envy, defend Hamlet for his humanity in thinking carefully and seeking confirmation before killing a man on the basis of the words of a ghost. As Girard notes in "Hamlet's Dull Revenge:"

Should our enormous critical literature on Hamlet someday fall into the hands of people otherwise ignorant of our mores, they could not fail to conclude that our academic tribe must have been a savage breed, indeed. After four centuries of controversies, Hamlet’s temporary reluctance to commit murder still looks so outlandish to us that more and more books are being written in an unsuccessful effort to solve the mystery. The only  way to account for this curious body of literature is to suppose that back in the 20^th century no more was needed than the request of some ghost, and the average professor of literature would massacre his entire household without batting an eyelash.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare has Hamlet raise profound and important questions about a revenge and violence ethic.

Painters gravitate to the same scenes from Hamlet, such as this one in which Hamlet, in the graveyard, looks at Yorick's skull. At this point, Hamlet has begun to feel at peace about his destiny. 

Hamlet, from the start, in his heart of hearts doesn't want to to kill Claudius. He doesn't like Claudius, but that doesn't equate to a desire to murder him. In fact, the ghost's revelations only intensify Hamlet's suicidal ideation, turning his aggressions inward. His reluctance to mirror the bloodthirsty killing behavior of his uncle continues even into Act IV.

In Act IV, scene 4, while he is waiting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to board a ship to England, Hamlet meets one of Fortinbras' captains and asks him what is going on. Fortinbras has been threatening since the play began to march on Denmark in revenge for perceived wrongs done against his own father. The captain tells Hamlet bluntly that Fortinbras is asking for safe passage so he can march an army across to Denmark to reclaim a worthless strip of land:

We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.

Hamlet wonders about this, and yet attempts to use Fortinbras as a role model to motivate himself to avenge his father's death. He castigates himself for his indecision, calling himself a coward for overthinking the act of revenge. But the more he tries to hold up Fortinbras as a model, the more his words show that he, at least subconsciously, thinks his counterpart is a monster. Hamlet says that Fortinbras is risking many lives for what is no more substantial than an "eggshell:" 

 Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare/Even for an eggshell. 

Hamlet then defines being "great"  in the conventional terms of his society, but as he does so, he inadvertently speaks a double language. Hamlet defines greatness as  to quarrel over nothing --"a straw"-- for the sake of "honor." This idea of greatness is palpably absurd: 

... greatly to find quarrel in a straw/When honor’s at the stake.

Hamlet nevertheless continues to try to bury his doubts about violence by comparing himself to Fortinbras and wondering how he, Hamlet, can continue to "sleep:" 

How stand I then, /That have a father killed, a mother stained, /Excitements of my reason and my blood, /And let all sleep ...

Hamlet once again uses language that reveals that he thinks it is ridiculous to gamble with the deaths of 20,000 men for a "fantasy." He states that the number of lives Fortinbras is risking are more than could be buried on the land they are being asked to take, underscoring the absurdity of his rival's  quest:

 The imminent death of twenty thousand men, /That for a fantasy and trick of fame /Go to their graves like beds, /fight for a plot /Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, /Which is not tomb enough and continent/To hide the slain?

Using Fortinbras as a template, Hamlet decides he will stick to "bloody" thoughts. Tellingly, however, he does not break from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his powerless courtier companions, to return to the castle and immediately kill Claudius. Instead, he boards a ship to England, putting a sea between himself and Claudius--an astonishing negation of all he has  just declared in his soliloquy.

Hamlet doesn't come to "peace" with himself until he arrives in England. As Girard notes, he caught between a Christian and a pagan ethic in a culture where the two rest uneasily side by side. Girard is wrong, however, in seeing Hamlet as simply an imitator of other vengeful sons around him: Hamlet is not slavishly following the model of Laertes--or Fortinbras--in seeking revenge. Hamlet is his own person.

As he so often does (see, eg, Henry V, act four, scene 1) Shakespeare uses the bloodthirsty imagery of heroic language to undercut and point out the barbarism of his culture's notions of heroism. In weaving into Hamlet the story of monstrous Pyrrhus--and waving red flags at this story with a long quote from it--and by including a long soliloquy in which Hamlet cluelessly lays bare the barbarism of the very honor code he vows (but fails) to uphold--Shakespeare critiques the conventional ethics of the "great." He even goes so far as to gesture toward a figure in the pagan world--Brutus--who defines honor in a way that defies the revenge and violence ethic.

This will bring us to the next blog. For all his anguish over revenge, is distaste for violence, and a thoughtful, sensitive nature, Hamlet is also a prince--and this leads him to kill.  High rank mars this most introspective of characters. 

Journal of a Plague Year: Life from the Center

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene.... It is radiant. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time. Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

This time last year, I attended yoga class four to six times a week, as well as Quaker groups and meetings, and, as an experiment, immersed myself in the process of self-publishing a book. I had the same almost full-time work-at-home schedule I have now. My daughter was getting married, I was researching a scholarly paper on Virginia Woolf, and Roger and I were making frequent weekend trips, including one to New York City to look at wedding gowns with Sophie and Ben (and have dinner with relatives and see museums).

While in New York, we took advantage of the time to see a show at the Guggenheim given over to Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), whose abstract works predate Kandinsky and certainly the 1960s pop-art they anticipate. Above is one her traditional painting, done early in her career. Below is a later painting, done after she started believing she was being given visions. Now, unable to museum tour, we watched a wonderful 2019 documentary on Klimt: Beyond the Visible. 

The Klimt film Beyond the Visible argues that art history needs to be rewritten to give credit to this reclusive figure. She did, however, give a show in London at the Friends Meeting House, which Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury artists must have been aware of (Fry was raised a Quaker and, and as we all know, brought modern art to England.) Klimt had wanted her works displayed in a spiral building like the Guggenheim--and she, Kandinsky, and Wright were all disciples of theosophy. 

There was a measles outbreak near the airbnb where we were staying in Brooklyn, and I remember wondering how this crowded area would fare in an epidemic. Thinking about the measles had led me to start rereading Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, a project that I now look back on as naive.  I had no expectation at all that a year later I would be in the midst of a worldwide pandemic--this despite many warnings that such a thing could happen.

In retrospect, it seems ironic I was rereading Defoe's fictionalized account of the London plague of 1666, A Journal of the Plague Year,  a year before our own pandemic.  Now I am glad I did. 

This time last year we attended Nick's graduation from Allegheny College, where he won the "spirit of philosophy" award. We had a celebratory dinner in Pittsburgh. Will joined us for the weekend. We ate out at least once weekly, made visits to Roger's mother in a nursing home, and visited Will in Richmond, Indiana as I researched Virginia Woolf's Quaker aunt, Caroline Stephen, another Woolfian project. It was a period, because of a crowd of events, in which I was spending every other weekend out of town.  At home,  I seemed to have constant errands, plus hair appointments and the occasional lunch with a friend.  And yet, I would have protested I led a quiet life. Now that life looks enormously packed.

It is a year later. I look out my window. The long grass tips in the meadow quiver in the breeze. We have had so much rain that everything is brilliantly green, as if this is Ireland. Small leaves appear on the oak tree. The water on the lake ripples and sparkles. The barn, repainted red twelve years ago, is beginning to peel: I do lead a quiet life in the country. 

I have lost track of what week it is of our extended "shelter in place."  Roger now works from home. Nick is an essential worker as he stocks shelves at night in Kroger, an interim job to land him on his feet after college. He gets a "hero's bonus" of an extra $2 an hour for one more week. We go for groceries every other week. Sometimes, I have run other errands. We adjust to wearing masks in public.

The world has slowed. My lungs seem to expand and take in air as I think of the earth getting a breath, a chance to heal. This is a time when blue skies dawn over quiet cities. That seems a huge gift. We are not now ceaselessly overworking the planet which gives us the possibility of life.

Our lake, May of last year. Whatever I write, always a part of the story is left out. I am appreciating this extraordinary gift of retreat and quietude but there are times I long to see people. 

When the weather permits Roger and I take walks. Sometimes I walk alone around our acre of yard.  However, not having been brought up in the way of the British to slog through bouts of seemingly incessant rain, I stay indoors when the weather is bad. As I do, I think of Virginia's Woolf's habit, formed early, of daily walking, rain or shine. Yesterday, mid-May, we woke to frost and snow on our cars. It was warmer in Chawton, England, Jane Austen's home, than Ohio.

Today, weather permitted, so Roger and I took a walk. He knew where the gate was to get us into the pasture nearby. We walked there, seeing an idyllic brook with two small waterfalls.  I am appreciating the slower, healing rhythms of this simpler life.

Sometimes in years past, when I was trying to calm my racing brain, I would look at old photos on the internet from the 1940s of women washing the marble steps of row houses in my birth town of Baltimore.  Who would have time for that anymore, I would wonder. But now we have that time back. Activities a year ago squeezed to flatness and crowded out by business now expand and take up space.

Our basement is cleaner. We sorted out Roger's closet. We cook frequently: I have tried new recipes, made Indian red beans, homemade salad dressing, waffle batter. Roger cooks and makes frozen margaritas and lemon drop martinis at home. Not eating out has not been the hardship I imagined, though I do miss it as a seemingly lost way of life. My reading continues at a steady pace but feels far less harried.

It seems ironic, too, to be reading this year about travel and movement when we are "sheltering in place."

During this pandemic, I feel for lost lives and lost jobs. It can seem frivolous to write about a life that has so far existed in a bubble untouched in many ways by what is going on.

Life now has some of the feeling of Groundhog Day, a repetition of the same day rather than endless variety or the illusion thereof.  Life therefore develops a new rhythm. There is time. The world is no longer too much with us. I hadn't realized before how much pressure I was putting on myself to keep my time "filled." Why does time have to be "filled" in a rush of activity? Why not allow white space? Why not let what is there already in time and place expand?

Something in our hearts-- my heart--has longed for this quiet life of contemplation. And now, miraculously, we live Yeats' dreamscape of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree:"

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In our bubble, our waiting stasis, there is a sense of uncertainty. What will happen next? What will the future hold?  I remind myself that there's always been this uncertainty, usually, of course, hidden under the illusion of "normalcy," the illusion people so often hold that what is now will always be, immutably. If we don't know what the future holds, we didn't six months ago either.