Somedays, I spend the day with Hamlet. Of course it sounds crazy, but it's not--and it took a long time for me to understand this. If you read something over and over again, teach it, learn it in a new way from others, then it stays with you. And so those days when heavy decisions need to be made, and I need to guess at the motives of those driving those decisions, and I know that I can trust some folks explicitly and others not so much, well I start talking in my head with Hamlet. I'm still angry at him for the way he treated his mother; and still proud that he called out Rosencrazt and Gildenstern the way he did. He misread Ophelia though. He just did and there was no way to come back from that. He must have been a mess when he was alone after that. There is so much honour in going forward though, avenging and rectifying his mistakes for Hamlet...doing the daily tasks of work, home and the community for the rest of us.Hamlet did this. He played out his life after his father, girl friend and then mother were gone. He was honest at the very end with Horatio. Friendship was able to overcome everything else and both just loved for a moment. If we live with these characters, these dramas and works and writings from the past, then they will stay with us at in the world we live in--at work, at home, with family and friends. Procol Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" is a weird song that mixes personal experience (in a bar...maybe after a broken relationship) with a mind that has considered Chaucer and his Miller's Tale and Livy and the vestal virgins of Rome and for a moment, they all come together. Ford Swetnam, one of my favourite poets, wrote a terrific poem call 301 where he plays darts with a couple of Vietnam Vets and includes renaissance writer Ben Jonson in the group--he has a book of Jonson's that stands in for the poet. But Jonson is there with them, with him as he sorts through the wisdom in some of their comments and the insanity of others. Swetnam sorts out what it all means with Jonson, with the worldview that Jonson brought to him over time. Some people (and some of my friends) do this with the Bible. I'm okay when they are with Jesus and less comfortable when they are with Paul or one of the old testament voices.
Hamlet never gets old. There are so many remarkably different scenes, situations, tensions, decisions, motives, outcomes and reflections in the play--they mirror daily life and invite us to consider them even as we deal with the events and challenges of our own lives 450 years later.
