[b]Tom Stoppard
I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder then a man talking nonsense not to himself.
Or just as mad.
Or just as mad.
And he does both.
So there you are.
Stark raving sane. [/b]
Well, I’m glad that’s settled.
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
So, would that work for you?
I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Or, here, posting.
Why don’t you go and have a look?
Pragmatism?! Is that all you have to offer?
Still, sometimes that is the way to go.
Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.
It’s funny how these things seem to work.
There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time.
Let’s file this one [immediately] under, “fat chance”.