all is fair in love and war | Ashland, OR
Six years ago, in 8th grade, our class took a road trip to Ashland, Oregon. We had finished reading Macbeth, which in retrospect was entirely ridiculous. Though I can’t help but believe that overly complicated and incomprehensible literature was a factor in my being able to appreciate literature later on in my life. I believe that people learn more than they can articulate — or even recognize.That’s why doing things for no particular reason is so important.
You know how a lot of people say that you are the sum of your experiences? Well, there’s some truth to that. As you go through life accumulating a collection of ecclectic and diverse experiences, you begin to think in a diverse and eclectic way. This is a gift. Imagine a world where we all thought the same things. It would be terrible. There would literally be nothing to talk about. We’d all just sit there silently agreeing with each other.
But even when you think you don’t understand something or read something that you feel didn’t stick with you, your brain is still processing it. It’s still taking it in for later use, and that’s powerful. This is a reason that it’s important to follow your interests. If you do things you like, you’ll spend more time on it, and take in more information, and find more ways to think about things. That’s the important thing because whether you know it or not, every piece of information we take in is being used in one way or another.
You kind of recognize this in your everyday life when your intuition informs you of something that you have no experience with at all, or you find that you take in old information in a new way. I experienced this recently having returned to the bay area. I took bart to Embarcadero, and walked around the city a bit. It felt completely different having walked in 5 or 6 of the other big cities in the US just this summer. Taking in all of that information from Nashville, LA, San Diego, New York, New Orleans, and more incorporates into your understanding of the world. It unforgivingly and indellibly alters you and your perception.
I digress.
Now, having developed an appreciation for the arts and literature, I thought it would be a good idea to visit Ashland again. I got tickets for the 8:00PM showing of Antony and Cleopatra and a showing the next day of Much Ado About Nothing.
Antony and Cleopatra like all plays, is a story of tragic love, and from it, I hoped to find the answers to my tragic love life. What I found instead was an unrestrained desire to understand trust and power, in love and 0therwise.
Much Ado About Nothing, as if to equilibrate the prior, is an unlikely but successful love story. I hoped to shed some light on humanity, and it did in the slight.
Some of my favorite quotes:
- “Much is breathing”
- “Silence is the perfect harold of joy”
- “Everyone can master a grief but he who hath it”
- “She makes most hungry, most what she satisfies”
Shakespeare, my man, I can honestly say, now, that you must have been one hell of an Elizabethan stud because your language makes even me melt. EVERYONE has something to learn from you, but it’s not just the ideas. Your words seem to swirl together like the foam of a hipster barista’s most impressionable latté art. You’re as complex as the coffee’s subtle notes, and as satisfying as the milk’s creamy froth.
Enough erotic novelling. I love number 1 because it’s a great reminder. I immediately thought of that Woody Allen quote, “80% of success is just showing up.” I hate that quote because it makes people seem really pathetic. Like really, if that’s all success is, then how can so many people fail at so many things? But it’s true. A lot of times, we give successes up by merely not showing up. When people want to break up but cannot, they ignore each other. When you don’t really care about a class, you don’t go. It’s astoundingly true, and it’s not that much of a stretch to say that “much [of life] is breathing.”
When life gets complicated, just remember: all it is, is breathing.
My translation of quote #2 is a phrase that I’ve used before in real life,
you don’t have to say anything
but it’s more elegantly said and involves a little more nuance. The idea is that silence could say more in that moment than any words could. In saying, “silence is the perfect harold of joy,” Shakespeare personifies silence into a delivery boy of emotion. Typically, words deliver meaning, but here, the lack of words does. Utterly beautiful.
Quote #3 is a desperate situation. Your best friend is a mess. She’s just broken up with her first serious boyfriend because he cheated on her. She comes over to your place every night, ignoring the guy who is sometimes laying in the top bunk — your bed — looking down annoyed even though you do a good job to hide your frustration. Even though it’s hard for you to feel bad for your friend, you know that everyone’s life is difficult, especially to them. You do a decent job of making them feel better, but in the process you traded your soul.
Your grief is real to you, but your friend’s is only a proxy grief. Proxy grief ain’t real grief, and you know that, so nothing you say or do can help your friend. But you try anyway. I guess it’s only important that you say something.
And from your friend’s side. Nothing you do or say or think can change the fact that you feel like you want to kill the world. Your friend’s being there is nice, and you’re sorry that you prevented her from getting laid, but you know she can’t help you with anything. The pain will return almost immediately after you step out of the room. You know it’s a battle that you have to fight on your own and that even if your friend tells you exactly what you have to do, to do it is another story and might not even work for you.
You have to find your way out.
This is very human, and Shakespeare captures it in one line.
Quote #4 is what I have come to believe true love is. A lot of people seem to think that the pursuit of happiness is better than happiness itself, and to those people, I introduce a new parable: the pursuit of satisfaction is better than satisfaction itself. If you find someone who “makes most hungry, most what [they] satisfy,” you will love that person forever. Need I say more?
I will for the sake of clarity. The problem with many relationships is that at a certain point, the investment required to get satisfaction from that person is easily underwhelmed by the investment required to get satisfaction from someone new. If you’re never satiated, and you always want more of the other person, you’ll do everything in your power to stay with that person. Ideally, both parties will feel this insatiable satiability, and will cultivate a healthy relationship because only they can satiate each other. I believe this is the ideal, and I think it is achievable.
Hey, apparently, Cleopatra did it.
I didn’t understand plays before because I compared them to movies. (To be honest, I’m not sure if I even understand movies anymore.) Of course, when you compare movies to theatre, plays don’t make sense — they’re less exciting; there are few if any special effects, and you can’t always understand what the characters are saying. But I’ve come to believe that movies weren’t meant to replace plays, even if that’s what they’ve begun to do — or have already done.
Plays — although they don’t appear to be — are accurate representations of life. No where else is it more evident that we are all playing a fictional role in the world in which we can control everything about how our character is portrayed and behaves. In watching plays, we gain an understanding of other lives we could live, other people we could be, and in doing so, we cultivate a realistic understanding of humanity and experiences we encounter every single day.
