Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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Benjamin Franklin famously or infamously said that the country was a Republic, if you can keep it. To liken great things to small, this is a blog if I can keep it up, but isn’t that true of everything in life? When I started this blog in November 2020, it wasn’t clear to me how… Continue reading Celebrating 1,000 posts with a few near incoherent thoughts on the past, present, and future
If only we could sleep as easily as we can die. I could end my life in an instant, but for reasons that defy explanation, simply putting the mind to rest for a few hours can prove impossible. If only we could sleep as easily as we can die. I could, if I chose, end… Continue reading Sleep, death, and the limits of Mark Twain and William Shakespeare
Before the age of political correctness, they used to say that behind every successful man was a special woman. While this is true for me, I don’t think it was intended to apply to expanding one’s taste in music. Shortly before I got married, a colleague asked me to describe my future wife in three… Continue reading Elton John, a cat named “Hercules,” an “Indian Sunset,” and the persistence of my lovely wife
If Polonius had taken his own advice to be true rather than false and kept his command to his daughter to avoid Hamlet, Ophelia and the royal family might still be alive. The phrase “To thine own self be true” is familiar to almost everyone, having taken on a life of its own after William… Continue reading “To thine own self be true” and the importance of the source and context of advice
It’s the year 1600 and I am already an accomplished playwright, having written plays and created characters like Romeo and Juliet that would be revered for centuries. This might have been enough for any other artist, but I am not any artist by any means. I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet. It’s the… Continue reading I am William Shakespeare about to write Hamlet
Henry V was literally and figuratively born in blood, especially as his father became king after starving the former ruler, Richard II. We should probably not spare Richard too much sympathy, however. He was the last of the Plantagenet kings, who rose to power on a tide of violence in the 12th century, violence that… Continue reading The real Henry V, the Magna Carta, and the glorious depravity we are heir to
In an era where TV rarely ventured beyond the dreaded “To be be continued…” ending, Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost placed a bet that people wanted more, that the mystery was important for the sake of the mystery, that not everything needed to be explained, and that sometimes things are better without an ending. In… Continue reading David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the birth of two genres, at least
It’s human nature, but if you value what you have now, what you’ve seen, done, and hopefully learned, why would you want to go back to a point where you had none of it or at least less of it? Aging is a funny thing to say the least. I suspect almost all of us… Continue reading New Year’s, the mysteries of aging, and whether we’d really want to go back in time to be our younger selves
The entire aside is unnecessary purely in terms of the plot, but Hamlet remains about far more than that. Perhaps, it is best seen as a vessel for ideas, where they come from, how they evolve, and where they go, and the beings that carry them. The eminent literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom once… Continue reading “We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots,” how Shakespeare captures both the circle of life and the futility of existence in a single sentence
It’s a credit to Shakespeare’s genius that he was able to craft one of the greatest plays ever written from such an unbelievable beginning, but it’s also his genius that the opening is the very heart of it all. Despite his protestations, Lear has broken one of the bonds that protects civilization from the lawlessness… Continue reading King Lear and the primal genius of Kenneth Branagh
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 