The Soul of Wit

This is a landmark entry, and not just because it's the first one in more than a year (how disgraceful). This week I just finished reading the first substantial piece of nonfiction that I have ever read for pleasure, a biography called Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. With so many books on my metaphorical nightstand (not to mention a thesis that I have yet to begin writing), I suppose it's rather strange that I chose this particular moment to begin my foray into biography. That I did so is probably due to a combination of factors: I saw the book while restlessly roaming the student bookstore, itching to buy something; I'm passionately fond of Shakespeare, and was unfortunately unable to take the second half of the yearlong survey course (which I'm still bitter about, by the way); and I recognized the author, Stephen Greenblatt, as a well-known Shakespeare scholar and the editor of The Norton Shakespeare.

The book is brilliant. Greenblatt takes what could be construed as a dangerous approach, interweaving his own insightful analysis with passages from Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and other poems, and using all these texts as sources of or support for his assertions. The danger of this strategy lies in the possibility of reducing the person (the playwright, the poet) to his works, which would be to demean the great imaginative achievement of writing fiction in the first place, but Greenblatt deftly avoids that pitfall. He never mistakes the myriad of characters that Shakespeare created with their creator, but rather speculates intelligently about the circumstances and considerations that could have resulted in their creation.

What emerges is an incisive, engaging narrative of one possible life that William Shakespeare could have led. I know that this account may be entirely incorrect, but somehow that does not detract from its charm. Perhaps the book is the more poignant for its underlying uncertainty, the illusory quality of its subject, a writer we can only glimpse through the illusions he imagined for his own time, but which have outlasted him into ours.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(The Tempest 4.1.56-58).

Posted by Revati Nafday at 11:09 PM | Permalink

I actually wrote this during my first semester as a freshman, a lowly general chemistry student struggling with the unit on thermodynamics. I was not yet initiated into the College of Chemistry: I had not experienced the euphoric high of succeeding at an organic chemistry synthesis problem after six hours; neither had I arrived at the current sobbing, screaming, unhinging lows of physical chemistry. It occurs to me, however, that while this piece is not particularly lyrical or polished, it resounds now even more than it did two years ago. Note the splendidly bad pun in line 11.

Thermochemistry
Chem-turned-physics: a fiend I dare not face —
I fear the Gorgon and stare into space.
My energy sources hourly deplete
as this, in vain, I struggle to complete.
So, too, does the world's energy evolve
into the work that people do to solve
the other Medusas of problem sets —
question upon question that no one gets.
Energy is conserved, so heat is lost;
for work, the universe exacts a cost.
Each person's a joule, part of the treasure
we combust as fuel, but fail to measure:
We replenish fossil fuels with our own,
cracking chem even as we turn to stone.

Posted by Revati Nafday at 08:45 PM | Permalink