William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1)
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
In the 400 years since this was written has there been any better summary of man’s discomforting relationship with consciousness and conscience in the face of the fearsomely ‘unknowable’; death?
All philosophy before or since is but a variation of the elemental struggle between opposing themes and extremes; life and death; consciousness and unconsciousness; comfort and discomfort; right and wrong (and here by ‘right’ I mean what has brought the individual joy and by ‘wrong’; pain).
‘All sins remember’d’ is simply a reminder that we live by our remembering; damned we are by that ‘cowardly’ conscience! But, when all ills, transgressions, humiliations and tribulations are forgotten; then we have in effect become unconscious. Welcome then, conscience the brave.
Who, in their right mind though, would wish to ‘suffer the slings and arrows’ of slavery? To ‘oppose’ and ‘end’ in this case would be to resist that which may attempt to conquer and enslave. But if resistance should fail would it then be nobler to die than to live?
And what if our master is simply our own conscience? Should we wish to be free of such a restraint? What then? Would it be possible to approach life more honestly without its constantly pricking us?
The world will turn regardless of what we think. And yet…?