Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

I hate coming up with titles for posts, so I’m just going to go line-by-line through Paradise Lost for the next… mm.. many thousand posts! (I’ll definitely be dead by then. Or the internet will have eaten itself.)

Mr. Turtle is now trained to come to the surface and pop his head out when he sees the little silver spoon I use to feed him bloodworms. I wonder how trainable reptiles are… if you can train birdbrained pigeons to play ping pong, anything’s possible. Just ask Jim. Stay tuned for: the basket-weaving wonder turtle.

I just finished re-reading the short play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. It was a Christmas gift from the mom unit a few years back; she remembered picking it up after reading Hamlet when she was in high school and thinking it was hilarious. I’m not sure how well she read it! It has its funny moments with little winks to the audience when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern confuse their own names- Rosencrantz bows when Guildenstern is acknowledged, and vice versa. But overall, I found it pretty dark… there’s a pervading sense of emptiness and a frustrating lack of memory and free will that the characters occasionally struggle against.

At the end of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on a boat to England after their prisoner Hamlet tricks his way into returning to Denmark. The pair’s end, mentioned briefly in Hamlet–and the title of the book, is an execution before the king of England.

PLAYER: You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s enough.

GUIL: No–it is not enough. To be told so little–to such an end–and still, finally, to be denied an explanation–

. . . .

GUIL (tired, drained, but still an edge of impatience): No… no… not for us, not like that. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over… Death is not anything… death is not… It’s the absence of presence, nothing more… the endless time of never coming back… a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…

The light has gone upstage. Only GUIL and ROS are visible as ROS’s clapping falters to silence.

Small pause.

ROS: That’s it, then, is it?

No answer. He looks out front.

The sun’s going down. Or the earth’s coming up, as the fashionable theory has it.

Small pause.

Not that it makes any difference.

Pause.

What was it all about? When did it begin?

Pause. No answer.

Couldn’t we just stay put? I mean no one is going to come on and drag us off… They’ll just have to wait. We’re still young… fit… we’ve got years…

Pause. No answer.

(A cry.) We’ve done nothing wrong! We didn’t harm anyone. Did we?

GUIL: I can’t remember.

ROS pulls himself together.

ROS: All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.

And he disappears from view. GUIL does not notice.

GUIL: Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a message… a summons… There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said–no. But somehow we missed it. (He looks round and sees he is alone.)

Rosen–?

Guil–?

He gathers himself.

Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you– (and disappears).

Kinda reminds me of the hanging in The Prestige. Really, looking back, the only funny bit is when the two play Questions; you’ll recognize it if you’re familiar with the same game on Whose Line?

To end on a much lighter note, someone is going to be very upset that his yellow dry-erase marker is completely out.

Filed under: books, general , baby turtle, conditioning, dry erase, eclipse, rosencrantz and guildenstern, the office