Touchstones are important in my life. I find things that interest me, and then I explore them way past levels that are healthy or normal. I talked a bit about my obsessions before--well, this is how I get them. Something comes my way and I start to understand it on deeper levels.
Music is a quick example. My buddy, many years ago, tried to get me to listen to Rx Bandits. I didn't really give them a try until after my mission. It was the same sort of synergy between souls as what I get with Gayle. Their music resonates deeply, (almost) always perfectly with how I think of music, what I appreciate in it, why I think it matters. Since they became my new favorite band (replacing Dave Matthews Band as my longest musical love), I have attended almost every concert that they've brought to Salt Lake, enduring their obvious dislike of the venues and attitudes of the crowds. I'm willing to set aside their prickliness because their music is what my soul sounds like.
As a result, I have spent hours learning how to play some of my favorite songs on the guitar. I think a lot of people learn to play the guitar for social reasons. They're ubiquitous, and it's an easy way to break the ice--snatch up a six-string, strum some familiar chords, maybe even bust into a version of a cool-but-over-played cover, and bam, you're socially involved. That was never the case for me. I never learned the guitar for other people. It was always for me and what I found fulfilling.
The same goes, but to much larger degree, with Shakespeare. I originally felt an obligation to like Shakespeare because I was into books and reading. I eventually fell in love with him (summer of 2006) by virtue of a superb version of Hamlet down at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Since then, he's been a perpetual part of me. I estimate that I have read, listened to, or watched Hamlet almost sixty times in the last decade, and the play still yields treasures to me. It's a sun of profundity, spilling light into the darkness of humanity without exhausting itself.
As my obsession with Shakespeare grew, it turned into wanting to know more about the time in which he lived. I purchased a book on English history only because it connected with Shakespeare's history plays. Almost every history book I pick up--and even science books--is flipped to the index before I'm too deep into it to see if it mentions the Bard. Despite knowing I'm teaching poorly, I can't help myself when I teach Hamlet: I have to talk about what's inside of me that the text exposes. Shakespeare is an immense swirl of energy to me, and every time I try to broaden my orbit, it's only to find that which provided Shakespeare his gravity.
Such is the case of the current book I'm listening to by Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I. I have been on it for almost a month--probably longer--picking away whenever I get a few minutes. It is only tangentially related to Shakespeare, as the playwright bumped into Her Majesty only a handful of times, and those were not terribly important to Old Bess--so they have little pertinence to the book. Nevertheless, I'm thrilling at the entire experience: Not only is the reader British, so I've been listening to a British accent for hours, but it's filled with all sorts of fascinating tidbits that explain Elizabethan life, why the world was the way it was for Shakespeare, and adding details about things that I had always heard about but never fully understood.
And as much as I enjoy British history--imperialists though they are--flows from the fountain of my Bardolatry. It's an intoxicating thing for me to explore; I'm like Gertrude in Hamlet, who is described as in her adoration of her husband "As if increase of appetite had grown/ By what it fed on" (1.2). I haven't hit my saturation point yet--and I hope that I never do.
Music is a quick example. My buddy, many years ago, tried to get me to listen to Rx Bandits. I didn't really give them a try until after my mission. It was the same sort of synergy between souls as what I get with Gayle. Their music resonates deeply, (almost) always perfectly with how I think of music, what I appreciate in it, why I think it matters. Since they became my new favorite band (replacing Dave Matthews Band as my longest musical love), I have attended almost every concert that they've brought to Salt Lake, enduring their obvious dislike of the venues and attitudes of the crowds. I'm willing to set aside their prickliness because their music is what my soul sounds like.
As a result, I have spent hours learning how to play some of my favorite songs on the guitar. I think a lot of people learn to play the guitar for social reasons. They're ubiquitous, and it's an easy way to break the ice--snatch up a six-string, strum some familiar chords, maybe even bust into a version of a cool-but-over-played cover, and bam, you're socially involved. That was never the case for me. I never learned the guitar for other people. It was always for me and what I found fulfilling.
The same goes, but to much larger degree, with Shakespeare. I originally felt an obligation to like Shakespeare because I was into books and reading. I eventually fell in love with him (summer of 2006) by virtue of a superb version of Hamlet down at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Since then, he's been a perpetual part of me. I estimate that I have read, listened to, or watched Hamlet almost sixty times in the last decade, and the play still yields treasures to me. It's a sun of profundity, spilling light into the darkness of humanity without exhausting itself.
As my obsession with Shakespeare grew, it turned into wanting to know more about the time in which he lived. I purchased a book on English history only because it connected with Shakespeare's history plays. Almost every history book I pick up--and even science books--is flipped to the index before I'm too deep into it to see if it mentions the Bard. Despite knowing I'm teaching poorly, I can't help myself when I teach Hamlet: I have to talk about what's inside of me that the text exposes. Shakespeare is an immense swirl of energy to me, and every time I try to broaden my orbit, it's only to find that which provided Shakespeare his gravity.
Such is the case of the current book I'm listening to by Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I. I have been on it for almost a month--probably longer--picking away whenever I get a few minutes. It is only tangentially related to Shakespeare, as the playwright bumped into Her Majesty only a handful of times, and those were not terribly important to Old Bess--so they have little pertinence to the book. Nevertheless, I'm thrilling at the entire experience: Not only is the reader British, so I've been listening to a British accent for hours, but it's filled with all sorts of fascinating tidbits that explain Elizabethan life, why the world was the way it was for Shakespeare, and adding details about things that I had always heard about but never fully understood.
And as much as I enjoy British history--imperialists though they are--flows from the fountain of my Bardolatry. It's an intoxicating thing for me to explore; I'm like Gertrude in Hamlet, who is described as in her adoration of her husband "As if increase of appetite had grown/ By what it fed on" (1.2). I haven't hit my saturation point yet--and I hope that I never do.
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