Here are my notes made while reading Hamlet a second and third time and retelling the tragedy in my own words. It’s been my experience that rereading previous works as you get older provides new insights thereby expanding temporal bandwidth. Rereading Hamlet reset my Christian imagination.
“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
Pieper recommended an artistic vision – visual, musical or literary – as a conduit for the contemplative life. He proposed participating in the arts as a remedy for seeing anew, to see reality as it truly is.
“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Why read great literature from the past?
Love. Is it die-cut like the Valentine cards of grade school? Is it cliché like pop music? Is it a potion we constantly thirst for? Is it intoxication and under its influence we are not in our right minds? Is love passion? Sentimental? Carnal? Absolute? “What do any of us really know about love?”
“But I didn’t know if they could help me or not. Part of me wanted help. But there was another part.”
The subject’s universality – women doing manual labor – is a catalyst for imaginative truth.
Kingdom Venturers 