random musing from reading in front of the fan

Last night I was reading Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare. It’s a lot of information I’ve absorbed over the years… but he has a melodious narrative that is easy to read. Plus, well, it’s good to refresh one’s memory of knowledge and do a little pruning of interpretation. 

 I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, if you hadn’t noticed. BIG. And I like history. And like anything for which I have a great passion, it is easy sometimes to get caught up in the deliciousness of present delights… and forget some of the reality. So… I was reading last night and revisited the context of Shakespeare’s world. A world so regulated by class… in a way I don’t even think my imagination can fully comprehend. A world dominated by a church and a monarchy that could take whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted. And then there was the brevity of life, the overpowering of disease that affected all classes. Blind to the number of yards of cloth one wore.

I was reading these details – a nutshell, really, compared to the pages I voraciously consumed whilst gallery sitting my first year and a half at the IHOT. I dusted off the details of this world and thought… wow, even with all the crap that infuriates me about my country … man, am I glad to be lamenting the humidity in front of my electric fan, wearing a t-shirt and cropped yoga pants. Yeah… really… 2010 is not such a bad place.

Well, duh. Obviously. Except not so obviously. I am not a fan of academia that takes historical accuracy so seriously they forget to account for the human factor… the gray matter of emotion that creates all history. And yet… I also feel my gorge rise whenever I hear some ignoramus try to take the name of history in vain to argue the merit of his opinion. 

The past is… well it is a today that we’ve managed to get through. Whether the ‘we’ in question is our current selves or our forbears. And not having been around to speak to those people who lived through the early 17th century, I can only read a book every once and again to get an idea of what it was like. And even then, usually those authors have a fleeting grasp of what it was really like.

But back to the point that provoked me to set down these here thoughts. The past was rough. Ugly. And awful. Maybe this resonated because earlier yesterday I was scrolling through the New York Times, reading about rising unemployment, the dismal opportunity to become employed, and our persistently stupid belief that government is a bad greedy monster. So I’m reading about how people had to pay fines to wear a certain type of fabric. How people were killed for the slightest suspicions. How diseases were treated by bleeding. How there were fines for having a guest in one's cottage. How many brides were pregnant. How the queen was paranoid that her clothes were dusted with infectious disease. And then I think… really, really? We think we have it bad? We think taxes are a bad thing? Or… a new concept? When has there been a society – REALLY – that hasn’t had some sort of duty to pay to the people in charge? And… well, aren’t the people in charge now a little less, well, crazy?

Maybe not. I actually read history and marvel at how far we’ve come in some measures… and then sigh in lamentation at the fact that so much doesn’t change. Because it is still the human factor. The thing that so many people say is what makes this Shakespeare stuff so appealing four centuries later. That even if we don’t wear crinolines and have indoor plumbing… we all still love and hate. We get hurt. We get angry. We grieve. We grow old and watch our bodies fail us. We observe the unchangeable beauty of nature. We marvel at the complexity of the mystery of it all. We struggle for power. There are always rich who exploit the luck of their position and argue the poor are unworthy.  We are humbled by the brevity.  There is always a hope that things will get better, no matter how gloomy the present. 

But if that’s the case… if things don’t change… is that hopeful? Isn’t it discouraging to know that there are perpetually morons or selfish greedy whankers? Yeah. I suppose. But, well, then I go back to that thought sitting in front of the fan reading my book last night. 2010 is a pretty dismal present, but at least, well… at least I don’t have to worry about someone dumping their chamber pot on my head when I walk down the street.