There are quite a few thoughts I have been meaning to get up here, but just never did. The time is ripe for it, I think. I don't want to smash all of these separate ideas into one post, so consider the next three or four pieces belated responses to the last couple weeks.
At his poetry reading Frederick Turner said something, almost as an aside, that struck me; it seemed so important at the time that I scrawled it on my ticket, and I don't even remember the context now. He said, "It's a strange country, this being old." And that's a beautiful image, isn't it? I immediately thought of all the older characters in the works we have read this semester and how they function, how their age factors in. Probably quite obviously, King Lear stuck to the forefront of my mind, and it was King Lear who most inspired the short story I wrote for my final project. In his old age, he searches for assurance: assurance of his daughter's love, yes, but also of his entire purpose, his manhood. The scene I most obsess over in the explication of my short story (titled, I might add, "The Words of the King") is Act 3, Scene 4 with Lear and Edgar lost in the tempest. In this scene every single time Lear speaks - excepting four short instances - he either asks a question or wishes to ask a question. It's as if only in the midst of a great storm (the real physical representing his mental state) does Lear realize all of these questions he holds unanswered. Only in the midst of a great storm does he realize he doesn't, in fact, know everything he wishes to know. His old age acts as a shove - a desperate indicator that he has so little time to learn. He ignores Gloucester and the other men attempting to "save" him from the storm, berating Edgar, "[his] philosopher," in hopes to obtain the answers he's so desperate for as quickly as he can.
Without Turner's fleeting comment, I could not have written the short story that I did, and I thank him.
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