Tag: Shakespeare
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The only hope for continued individualism is belonging
While I find myself immersed in a culture that values individualism, I am reminded of a quote from the famous polymath literary figure, Jean Cocteau, that ‘We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.’ There’s a lot to that. I have grown up in a society which treasures individualism, so I’m certainly not disputing a…
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Doubt thou the stars are fire
What am I doing, thinking about love at my age? And don’t get all shmaltzy about that; don’t remind me that without love, there is no hope, no future, no point in going on… It’s not that I’ve never considered those arguments, but I’ve lived through them all, and am at peace with myself and…
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Regret-me-nots
Sometimes if I awaken during the black of a cloudy moonless night, I am gripped by an uncomfortable feeling I can’t identify, a feeling whose source is almost within reach, yet blurred and formless like a ghost. And then, as silently as it approached, it disappears again into the night leaving only shards like broken…
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Who’s there?
The past is prologue, isn’t it? Or at least it can help to explain how we now think about things -whether we accept the inevitability of uncertainty or flee from it like a pestilence. Of course, nothing can ever be completely certain: the sun may not rise tomorrow and yet we must act as if…
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Look the other way, please.
There really are inconvenient truths, aren’t there? There are some things that seem to slip quietly under the radar -things that go unremarked until they are brought our our attention. And even then, they are perhaps dismissed as unimportant -or worse, accepted and rationalized in an attempt to justify them as tools that enable the…
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To hold, as it were, a mirror up to Nature
Who am I? No, really -where do I stop and something else begins? That’s not really as silly a question as it may first appear. Consider, for example, my need to remember something -an address, say. One method is to internalize it -encode it somehow in my brain, I suppose- but another, no less effective,…
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Virtues we write in water
I’ve only recently stumbled on the concept of virtue signalling. The words seem self-explanatory enough, but their juxtaposition seems curious. I had always thought of virtue as being, if not invisible, then not openly displayed like chest hair or cleavage. Perhaps it’s my United Church lineage, or the fact that many of my formative years…