monk222 | Apr. 1st, 2012

Apr. 1st, 2012

Which leads to the more pointed question: do I really want to be here? But you have danced this dance so many fucking times, so you try to shrug it off and man-up a little.

Did you know that Hemingway was a cat person?

_ _ _

While the popular myth of Papa Hemingway surrounds the writer with lions and other big game, smaller felines played a larger role in the writer’s later life. By 1945, he had 23 cats, who were “treated as royalty,” according to "Hemingway’s Cats", which was published in 2006. Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary called the cats “purr factories” and “love sponges.” The descendants of those cats continue to live at the old Hemingway house (a fence was erected for them after a neighbor’s complaint led to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Because many of Hemingway’s cats were of the six-toed variety, “Hemingway cat” has become a colloquial term for polydactyl felines.

-- David Haglund at Slate.com

Sylvia is in college.

_ _ _

Last night we had our first fire drill. I was jerked into consciousness by a hoarse metallic siren scraping along the edges of sleep. I did not know from what dark pool of quicksand I had been torn. I thought first, my alarm clock has gone off at the wrong time. I reached frantically to turn it off, prodded by the inhuman screech of the siren. Then I knew. I leapt on my feet, grabbed coat & towel and burst out of my room, padding downstairs with the rest of the girls. We stood huddled in the hall, everyone in a sleepy, unreal stupor. I smiled shakily at someone. I went upstairs and fell into bed after they called roll. My nerves pained keenly. My fever made me restless, uneasy. So this is what we have to learn to be part of a community: to respond blindly, unconsciously to electronic sirens shrilling in the middle of the night. I hate it. But someday I have to learn - someday -

-- Sylvia Plath, The Journals 1950 - 1953

_ _ _

She dates the entry for October, and it marks her first account of college life. I am surprised and a little disappointed that she did not care to record anything from her first weeks in college. I guess the experience of so many new faces and new situations, along with a serious academic workload, kind of just washed over her. I can sympathize. I sorely regret that I did such a lousy job on my own journal during the college years, when I actually had a bit of a social life to write about.

Feeling put off, Hamlet has begun to stalk away, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will not give up their charge that easily, clinging onto him:

We’ll wait upon you!

But Hamlet understands that his sometime friends are Claudius’s servants and not his own.

HAMLET

No such matter: I will not sort you with the rest
of my servants, for, to speak to you like an honest
man, I am most dreadfully attended. But, in the
beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?

ROSENCRANTZ

To visit you, my lord; no other occasion.

HAMLET

Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I
thank you: and sure, dear friends, my thanks are
too dear a halfpenny. Were you not sent for? Is it
your own inclining? Is it a free visitation? Come,
deal justly with me: come, come; nay, speak.

GUILDENSTERN

What should we say, my lord?

HAMLET

Why, anything, but to the purpose! You were sent
for; and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to colour:
I know the good king and queen have sent for you.

ROSENCRANTZ

To what end, my lord?

HAMLET

That you must teach me. But let me conjure you, by
the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of
our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved
love, and by what more dear a better proposer could
charge you withal, be even and direct with me,
whether you were sent for, or no?

ROSENCRANTZ

[Aside to GUILDENSTERN] What say you?

HAMLET

[Aside] Nay, then, I have an eye of you.--If you
love me, hold not off.

GUILDENSTERN

My lord, we were sent for.

HAMLET

I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation
prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king
and queen moult no feather.

Then Hamlet gives us a speech for which Shakespeare climbed to his lyrical heights, and which has to be at least on a par with the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. Hamlet perhaps begins in the spirit of an antic, playing with the sort of malicious irony that he had just recently used on Polonius, but then falling seriously back onto his real interior struggle and angst, thinking aloud to himself more than speaking to his dubious friends.

I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

ROSENCRANTZ

My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

HAMLET

Why did you laugh then, when I said 'man delights not me'?

ROSENCRANTZ

To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what
lenten entertainment the players shall receive from
you: we coted them on the way; and hither are they
coming, to offer you service.

Marvin Rosenberg gives us the interesting interpretive line that the friends were genuinely laughing at Hamlet, on account of his maudlin self-pity, and when Hamlet challenges them on their laughter, Rosencrantz was just fortunate to be able to answer with the arrival of the players. This interpretation brings out the tension between Hamlet and his old friends.

When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

-- Vanity Fair

I was also struck by the closing note of this piece, in which it is suggested that, for people who most treasure their security and privacy, escaping the Internet may become a somewhat popular cause:

Aside from wealth or arcane knowledge, the only other guarantor of security will be isolation. Some people will pioneer new ways of life that minimize their involvement online. Still others will opt out altogether—to find or create a little corner of the planet where the Internet does not reach. Depending on how things go, that little corner could become a very crowded place. And you’d be surprised at how many of the best-informed people about the Internet have already started preparing for the trip.

That sounds alarmist, but I can see how all these intelligent screens can seem to be our own voluntary placement of Big Brother telescreens around our lives. We have been getting in the habit of putting our whole lives online, thinking of it as merely a medium, a kind of word processor-plus, when it is an intelligence system that takes in everything and can be used in any way by the powers that be.