Hamlet and I

I read the words of thinkers and sometimes I read Shakespeare’s tragedies, namely Hamlet, I’ve read Hamlet thirty or forty times when in need of a break from the words of thinkers, I don’t read fiction or the histories, which are largely the same thing, both make-believe, I’d rather read the words of the pure thinkers because thought is a condition of itself and only itself whereas fiction and history are a condition of the surrounding narrative, the surrounding narrative that outlives them. Stories may live forever in one form or another but pure thought is fleeting and must be captured. Descartes, for example, Descartes sat in his room staring at the confluence between two bedroom walls and his bedroom ceiling, stricken at once was he, by candlelight, with an idea he simply had to capture, an idea that had nothing to do with narrative, nothing whatever to do with the world he lived in, the political and religious turmoil, his chronic pain, no, his walls and his ceiling spoke to him in coded heresy and mathematical jargon and he rose, wraithlike, and hobbled to his desk by candlelight to compose an unprecedented system of geometric coordinates, timeless and omni-universal, not to mention incredibly practical, thanks to his capturing of it. It simply had to be done. This is of course not to say there’s no merit in narrative or fiction or history, especially the great works, no, but I prefer to cultivate the garden in my mind with the purest of the pure, the foundations of all thought, which of course leads to culture, innovation, social hierarchy, paradigm, transcendence, what have you. Ideas that form building blocks of all culture and sociography, and Shakespeare is different, I am constantly haunted by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though for reasons I know not, I’m connected to the text without having seen the great tragedy performed, without having any friend like Horatio, without any father living or dead to honor. Hamlet and I are unique,