As I was on my waterside yesterday, I managed to open a Vanity Fair link, notwithstanding the hospital's crackerjack Wi-Fi system, wherein one waits 10 minutes for a connection. My GOP thoughts and prayers are with those patients who just learned they have maybe 5 minutes to live and are urgently attempting to send a farewell message to friends and family.
The VF link was about Al Pacino. Never before did it strike me so powerfully: What the years do to us. I shan't dally. First, Al as I remember him. Then Al as he is today.
I enlarge this VF shot only to vividly display the withering years, even though he still looks good to me.
By the way, the VF piece was taken from a NYT interview in which Pacino said he had died from a bout with Covid. "My pulse was gone. It was so—you’re here, you’re not.... You have nothing.... I was gone....
"I didn’t see the white light or anything. There’s nothing there. As Hamlet says, ‘To be or not to be’; ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns.’ And he says two words: ‘no more.’ It was no more. You’re gone. I’d never thought about it in my life.
"But you know actors: It sounds good to say I died once. What is it when there’s no more?"
Shakespeare has an answer, so to speak, which the Shakespearean actor knows well. The Bard never lectures, never sermonizes, never writes think this or that; in his many works he just lays out the themes of life in all its most glorious and ugliest ways. And here, in these lines from Hamlet's soliloquy, he follows up on Pacino's "no more."
To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
"His quietus make / With a bare bodkin" — the latter, a dagger, hence knocking oneself off. Notice, however, that Shakespeare uses devoutly in the above, a religious reference, which opens the possibility of some divine tsk-tsking for killing oneself. As noted, this greatest writer of English literature never puts down absolutes. He questions, he meditates, he offers, he's open to all accountabilities. After all, what do we know?
It's our devoutness, then, that forbids us from doing what any rational person living a life of misery and pain — in the 17th century, damn near everyone; today, still way way too many — would do in a heartbeat: stab it. Yet our conscience, or dreading consciousness, of the unknown "doth make cowards of us all." And so we set the dagger aside, and endure.
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all....
I sound as though I'm lecturing. Heaven forfend. Merely a brief reply to Mr. Pacino's Shakespearean question, in Shakespeare's words. As for Hamlet? He'll stick around but he's still kinda stuck. Should he murder Claudius?