‘To be or not to be’—The Echoing Voice of Shakespeare
The compulsion to die, yet be at ease with the overwhelming surrounding, and to dress up a smile like everyone is watching. There is an entirety of misconception into the expanding world of literature—those that limit a person’s ability to talk of love, and sex and death like it’s a taboo—yet we sit here, trying arduously, recklessly fighting for our lives each day.
William Shakespeare, in his classic ‘Hamlet’ and undeniably the most impervious line in literature, poses a direct question to the entire race of human beings. Whether “tis nobler in the mind to suffer” or sleep like an inauthentic dweller—most of which, crafted by our own impulses in this overly irrational soil.
To slice an inch of the darkest and the ruins of each melancholic mind—one has to have experienced a phase of misery, like it’s our only option here. “tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”—for each mind that ever lived, and for the race to come to a realization that nothing is well, one has to have a sense of satisfaction that shall end it all.
“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil”—only when longing turns into a pointless tragedy but in this life and the next—no one ever listens and each self-infliction is brought into conceptuality like it’s a fancy thing. The progressive life demands of us so little—yet the wings of our own conviction walk against us.
And Shakespeare knows, that beauty in dying shall not hurt—“Must give us pause, there’s the respect”, even if one is left dancing at his own funeral—no matter if your lover didn’t show up, “The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay”.
In playing his character, Hamlet sees and knows that certainty is always exaggerated, and one does not know what death shall perchance even if the torments of this causal life end. There has been, for the cause is always a determinant of one’s judgment. But why does one, or what is the meaning of death if it’s meant to hold any further recitals.
In questioning the splendor of such art—it is as if one were programmed to juggle with a rope with both ends on fire. “No traveler returns, puzzles the will”, a retrospective insight into what the mind already knows—yet the questions that want to find a resolution.
When examining one’s own thoughts, there is a different, one that is inwardly drawn at the peak of a specific moment, that if fulfilled, the stars ought to align and the reindeer’s should not whisper. But the last talk, within the boundaries of one’s skin, and to think like nothing would matter tomorrow.
The words which flow and the actions that partake—there is no correlation but a mutually agreed upon tense. A person, feeling the density of this soil would have so little time to think, but to act will transcend a thought into one’s final seconds. And Shakespeare, in the coil of his words, we learn that a conversation with oneself (illustrious soliloquy by Hamlet) shall prove imperious, in order, or at least if the circumstances point us towards that—to live and be at control for once at least.
-Yogesh Chandra