Valentine’s Day (Imbolc) Valentine Moon
…The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns… Hamlet, Act III
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
(Shakespeare’s funerary monument, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford Upon Avon, England)
On the days when we celebrate our birth it seems apt to consider death. Just as we mark the point of emergence into the light, so will we be marked later by the date of our departure from it.
I quote Shakespeare twice here to underscore the changed meaning of the classics as we age. In some long ago speech competition I performed the Macbeth soliloquy in the oral interpretation. I have no idea how I did, but I can still hear the timbre of my seventeen year old voice giving shape and force to these words. I remember the repetition of the tomorrows, a pleasing force on the tongue. Petty sticks up high in my memory, something about the petty pace.
Life as a poor player struck me as an interesting, even arresting image, and I loved the closing line, delivering it with vigor and passion. A tale told by an idiot. Signifying nothing.
Two years later I would be reading Camus and Sartre, my mother would be dead and suddenly Shakespeare had a bite. 46 years old. That was my mother’s age at her death. Brief candle.
Death holds its secrets. What happens then is, ironically or perhaps inevitably, one of life’s great mysteries. As an undiscovered country, death has its share, probably more than its share, of speculative visits. Religionists go there in their imagination, often becoming quite specific in what they find. But they are no different from Macbeth. Death is still a bourn (destination) from which no traveler has returned.
(Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky,Nietzsche, Sartre) my heroes
Macbeth was such a traveler, too: “To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come…”
No matter how many miles around the sun, whether we go on our knees or at a run or a deliberate careful walk, our journey ends. As for me, I choose this life and all its joy and pain for as long as I can have it. Yet, I do not fear the other, much longer ancientrail. Who knows where it may lead, what dreams may come.
