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| date | 2000-12-06:16:17 |
| SelfConciousness |
There's a scene from Hamlet in which Hamlet is raging at Ophelia about how evil he is. He goes on about how he only lacks the time to carry out all his evil intentions.
The thing I noticed about the scene was how alien Hamlet seemed to me, raving about his own baseness. And I knew something had changed, in me. Once upon a time, I would have identified with what he was saying, I would have felt a deep inner resonance. I would have recognized Hamlet as someone like me. Suddenly (was it suddenly?) that wasn't true any more. It felt good. A lot of us got raised being told that basically what Hamlet said of himself is true of us: that we are nasty creatures, saved only by the mercy of God. Some of us are unlucky enough to believe it. And some of us are luckier still, to find someone who sees in us what we don't see in ourselves: our virtues and our strengths and our goodness. And who tells us, by word and deed, what she sees, in ways that we can't deny or disown. This is the key to living a virtuous life: to realize that we are virtuous, and to identify with our virtues rather than our vices. Moralists from Jesus Christ to Ayn Rand have sent the opposite message: they have told us that in any mixture of virtue and vice, the vice will dominate and in time destroy the virtuous. If this were so, the whole phenomenon of moral improvement would be impossible, which is demonstrably false. So the first step is to identify with your virtues. The second is to admit your vices. I'm not sure what the third step is, yet, but I think it has something to do with acting on what you've learned. |
| Creatures |
Spot the Fish is an algae eater who is currently the lone inhabitant of our home aquarium. We had some other fish but they died during the ice-storm two years ago, when the power was out for four or five days and we had to heat with, and cook on, the wood stove. The house stayed comfortably warm--it never got below 60 F even in the middle of the night--but the relatively large temperature variations and the lack of water circulation both put a lot of stress on the fish, and the rest of them succumbed to various things in the following weeks. Not Spot, though. This is a fish who will plow merrily along through thick and thin. I'm pretty sure if I left the tank out to freeze he'd just sit in the ice 'til spring, and then thaw out and go on doing his thing. He's starting to get a bit big for the tank, though, so perhaps for Christmas he'll get a new and larger home, and at the same time we'll get a few tetras or something to keep him company. |
| Movies |
I watched both Branagh's Hamlet and the one with Mel Gibson early this year, while trying to get back in touch with my inner thespian (it worked.) Both are good, but they make an interesting contrast--the play is surely too long, and Branagh's production opens with a disasterous rendering of the Ghost. But cutting out the Fortinbras subplot greatly weakens the structure of the play, and removes a very important piece of context against which Hamlet's actions must be understood. The central moment of the play is Act IV, Scene IV, where Hamlet, reflecting on the senselessness of Fortinbras' war on Poland, realizes that there is nothing to stop him from avenging his father's murder. In a world where no scruples matter, he decides:
We can argue with his evaluation of the world and with the logic of his response to it, but the absense of this scene leaves his motivation dangling. |