Sunday, December 15, 2013

Mistakes and where they lead us

I was writing in an earlier post about an encounter in a cemetery the other day. It was a little freaky. It had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with an orange parka, go figure :) I was, at that point, going to make an allusion to several characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. I'm not sure why now. My mind does work in mysterious ways. Anyway I had confused the grave diggers in Hamlet with two courtiers, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, who are also characters in the play.

I googled Rozencrantz and Guildestern and came across a play I had read years ago, by Tom Stoppard, Rozencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. Well, apparently, there are some memorable quotes from the play, all of which I had forgotten, until I happened upon a website that listed 75 of them. Here are a few that I liked, from the site goodreads.

Make-believe Reindeer :)

1. Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

2. We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

3. Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.

4. We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

5. It would have been nice to have had unicorns. 

6. ..reality, the name we give to the common experience.

7. Give us this day our daily mask.

8. A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer."

The last one is the saddest of all, I think. It's really sad that we need reality. I could live in an imaginary world.

How about you?

The picture? There's a difference between imaginary and fake. I'm not sure where these fit in and they came with price tags :)

Have a wonderful day!!

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