#TheMajorsCorner…..Subjects.

The thing about the club that I most enjoy is the chance to wallow in contemplation.
To most of you that might not sound like big news. After all, it is not senior’s shuffleboard, quoits or a rousing game of pickle ball, for heaven’s sake, but I find it soothing. In these so called golden years, which mostly appear to me to be a series of urinary accidents and horrendous falls, I look forward to staring out the window at our lovely harbour here in Victoria and clicking through subjects in my mind that I have long neglected.
I mean can one imagine living in the Augustan Age, that period of time (27 BC-14 AD) when the world was ruled by a single man, Emperor Augustus? Just as important to me was that Virgil, Horace and Ovid ruled the culture of the time as the literary giants that they were. To be quoted daily amongst intellectuals more than 2,000 years later is an almost supernatural achievement. Of course they flourished during the pagan times of the Roman Empire and were frowned upon by the later Christians. Religion always appears to get in the way of deep thought, don’t you think?
I don’t mean to pick on any one religion; they are all apparently based upon impossible miracles and therefore not debatable. If the basic rules of physics are asked to leave the room and the fairies run the meeting, nothing much in the way of progress will get done.
Let us take Ovid for a moment; he would return to have his day. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe owe much to the dear Roman writer, and the 16th and early 17th centuries became an Age of Ovid. Later on he was championed and copied by the likes of Swinburne, Shelley, Swift and even Shaw (Pygmalion). What a man! With his humour and his sensuality, he lives on to be discovered again and again.
Speaking of Shakespeare, I have been concentrating of late on what I think is his greatest creation, Hamlet. Certainly it is his most produced play if not simply the most produced, period. I recall clearly many teachers throughout my misspent youth droning on about the Dane and his soliloquy starting with “To be or not to be….”
There has always been a school of thought that Hamlet is thinking about suicide, as he is thunderstruck by the murder of his father by his uncle (Claudius) and then is traumatized into indecision by the marriage of his mother (Gertrude) to Claudius. Sure he kills Polonius and arranges the demise of his old companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but waffles endlessly about life and death and that bloody ghost.
His father (the ghost) was murdered by Claudius, who poured poison into his ear as he napped. I was always unsure about that, but obviously it worked. Anyway Hamlet, as you know, pretended he was crazy and just wandered about. Don’t we all feel that way sometimes?
More and more I find myself rushing into a room and then realizing I really have no idea why. There is a widening range of disconnects in my life, which I no longer find amusing, although cruelly my family does, so I have stopped rushing anywhere.
Now I shuffle more and more. That is why I enjoy calling over a club waiter to order a martini, knowing I don’t have to think about it anymore. Not only that, when the club flunky does return, it comes as a damn nice surprise, for more than likely I have completely forgotten the delicious “yum-yum soup.”
I suppose we adjust, as Hamlet had to. But I don’t like the ending of the play, where most of them die. The quote I enjoy the most is Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes:
“This above all – to thine self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
I for one wish I had followed Polonius’s thoughts more closely in my own life. Don’t we all? Ah, Shakespeare, ah, Ovid.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016.