Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight

[sovay]

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Comments

[muccamukk]

That's an incredible quote.

[sovay]

That's an incredible quote.

"But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."

[anna_wing]

It sounds nice, but I sadly have to disagree.

[sovay]

It sounds nice, but I sadly have to disagree.

Understood. That line is something I happen to believe in, because whether we are aware of it or not, history still happened. I can feel that Septimus overestimates the odds of the plays of the Sophokles, but the idea of the record of time which holds what human lives cannot is a familiar and a meaningful one to me. This particular instantiation was written by someone who had lost an entire life by the time he was eight. I don't think it's shallowly stated. Among its assorted angles, the play is about the things that are lost to human knowledge: much comes to light in its course, but much remains known only to the audience, the stand-ins for the completeness of time. We are the only ones who can put all the fragments together and we have the advantage of not being part of the pattern. But the pattern would still exist whether we could put it together or not. That's where Pressburger came in.

[luzula]

It is! Although I'm trying to decide whether I agree with it or not. Sometimes things can be so beautifully written that it kind of seduces you...

[muccamukk]

It reminds me of that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote:

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.

[luzula]

Also beautiful! And that one I am not conflicted about agreeing with. : )

[sovay]

Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.

I like that.

[sovay]

Sometimes things can be so beautifully written that it kind of seduces you...

Articulated in comments above, but tl;dr the idea that all information can be reconstructed in the precise form in which entropy overtook it is not the part that resonates with me nor even a part I imagine the audience is intended to accept uncritically, it is the reserve of time itself.