Theodotus: [On the steps, with uplifted arms] Horror unspeakable! Woe, alas! Help!
Rufio: What now?
Caesar: [frowning] Who is slain?
Theodotus: Slain! Oh, worse than the death of ten thousand men! Loss irreparable to mankind!
Rufio: What has happened, man?
Theodotus: [rushing down the hall between them] The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames.
Rufio: Psha! [Quite relieved, he goes up to the loggia and watches the preparations of the troops on the beach]
Caesar: Is that all?
Theodotus: [unable to believe his senses] All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?
Caesar: Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.
Theodotus: [kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant] Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.
Caesar: [inflexible] If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.
Theodotus: Without history, death will lay you beside your meanest soldier.
Caesar: Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.
Theodotus: What is burning there is the memory of mankind.
Caesar: A shameful memory. Let it burn.
Theodotus: [wildly] Will you destroy the past?
Caesar: Ay, and build the future with its ruins. [Theodotus, in despair, strikes himself on the temples with his fists] But harken, Theodotus, teacher of kinds: you who valued Pompey's head no more than a shepherd values an onion, and who now kneel to me, with tears in your old eyes, to plead for a few sheepskins scrawled with errors. I cannot spare you a man or a bucket of water just now; but you shall pass freely out of the palace. Now, away with you to Achillas; and borrow his legions to put out the fire. [He hurries him to the steps]
The book itself was printed in 1949, the year before Shaw passed away. I found it in the shelves of a Sydney bookshop, and its venerable pages are yellowed and coming apart at the seams. On the one hand, I am loath to use such rude materials as modern scotch tape to mend it; but then again, if this book were to disintegrate entirely, I would not find a copy to replace it in Singapore. And it has entertained me marvelously well so far.
This play, a prequel, as it were, to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, appeals to me more on first reading than the other venerable work. Partly, I think, it is because it is the more modern work, and the English is thus more readable. But also, it is a comedy, albeit a very clever and wry one. In it, a conqueror makes a queen out of a child, and she clings to the usurper of her empire, taking him as the model after which she fashions her own puppet rule of her dominion. It is absurd, yet tragically and believably so; it is funny, yet uncomfortably so. And I find myself decoding its meanings and subtexts far more easily than I did the Shakespearan work.
It hasn't been all that long since I read Thornton's Our Town, the last script that I enjoyed muchly. And I realise that these months have been filled with a lot of good books, recommended by friends and by reputation alike. This has been my blessing, and my bounty, I guess.
*
After school today, met up with Joel, and spent a few delightful hours chatting about literature, philosophy and all those things that make life worthwhile. I realise that I am poaching as many ideas from him as from works that I have read to bring to class. Outside the theories of memory and communication, my philosophies are a pastiche of other people's thinking. Overwhelmingly, I find that I am a much better conduit than I am a source; I lack the quickness of mind to fashion anything that is really original and incisive, and so I make do with what others provide me with: little snippets of wisdom, flashes of insight and pieces of experience. And out of this I try to make a pattern that makes sense and is practicable.
We were talking about communication. I said that language's highest, even only, purpose is communication, and he brought up the Post-modernist idea that language is all about associations and signs, many of which are self-reflexive. Take, for example, the idea of love; there is no practical common definition, unlike, say, the idea of a table, and when we talk about love, we can't separate it from our own individual and unique ideas of what love is. The term would be meaningless without our personal associations. And thus, when we use that word, and arguably every other word, we are talking about ourselves rather than about some objective abstract idea. And so, communication is essentially self-indulgent; we talk to others not to better know what they think, but to better know what we ourselves think. And this is related to the idea that the key to ourselves lies in other people, that they hold the element that can act as a catalyst that causes our selves to alchemically transform into something greater.
And, knowing this, one is vulnerable to stripping everything of its lyrical, associative meanings, to treating intense emotional connotations to words as inherently suspicious and distorting, to the Kunderan idea of "depriving ourselves of the right to tragedy", or something like that (excuse my misquoting). But I don't find such ruthless deconstructivism a necessary result of the awareness of the linguistic quicksand that we all operate in. I know that I am being sentimental; that I am manipulating, perhaps over-manipulating, your impressions of what I am actually saying, influencing your impressions of my ideas and, by extension, of my self. But the awareness is something to be enjoyed, isn't it? Consciousness of something is still desirable, whether it is philosophically or morally sound to partake in it. More experience is better, isn't it? And who can fully deprive himself of self-indulgence? Who can reconcile the paradox of selflessness with self-consciousness?
These philosophical exercises aside, it is always good to meet up with the guy. It's like going for a brain massage, I guess. It's the quality of the conversations, the meeting of the minds, that is really rare, and worthy of cherishing, no matter what the coming ages will bring us.
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