The Daily Babble

You know the rap on Shakespeare---good stories, but the plays are filled with cliches. There's a bunch in As You Like It, everything from "neither rhyme nor reason" to "wouldn't hurt a fly." Not to mention, "All the world's a play..."

It's actually part of the fun to hear the first instance of what have become common parlance, and to realize the origin and catch the context. But it's still more than possible to find passages that haven't been data-mined so thoroughly. One of my favorite bits of dialogue begins Act IV, when the high-spirited heroine of the play, Rosalind, still in her disguise as the male "youth" Ganymede, has a teasing conversation with the melancholy Frenchman, Jacques, the guy who came up with the "All the world's a play" speech.

Rosalind is chiding Jacques for being melancholy, but he's serious about it--he's made quite a study of the different shades of melancholy, though he insists his is unique:..."it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness."

Jacques is defining melancholy as a humorous sadness, which may ring true to us today as it seemed to fascinate several of the English Romantic poets. But what interests Rosalind is Jacques melancholy as a product of traveling. All of the people at this point in the play are in exiles in the forest of Arden, and had to travel a ways (at least 20 miles) to get there. But Rosalind is now pointed towards marriage, and is not interested in traveling as a way of life.

"A traveler!" Rosalind says. "By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands."

"Yes, I have gained my experience," is Jacques only reply, before another character enters and the play resumes its story.

Since I spent much of my working life as a traveler, "based" in one place but traveling on assignment for magazines and for my book, and since I have little sense of being at home where I now live, or perhaps anywhere I've lived, this passage has meant something to me.

I find myself at the start of the third act of my life, also owning nothing, with no progeny, with poor hands. But for a kid from a small western Pennsylvania town, I did see and experience a lot. Certainly more than if I'd stayed home, or perhaps even settled down in my 20s or 30s.

I did not gain any property or family. I gained only my experience. Cause enough for a humorous sadness?

Who knows? At my time, your life is your life, whatever it was is what you are. I had intended to collect some of my articles written as a result of my travels into a book. One of the reasons I created my archival blog, kowincidence, was to begin collecting and editing the articles I wanted to preserve, part of my little legacy. I had intended to self-publish, of course.

Now that seems less likely to happen. I've done a lot of the most interesting part to me, which is revisiting some (but not all) of those pieces. I suppose selecting and putting a book together would be interesting, and maybe I'll be motivated by that sometime, but there is no exterior demand I'm aware of, and so no motivation from that source. And there are always other things to do just to get by. And especially the question of paying for it.

However, I did select a title for such a collection, and it comes from this conversation in this play. I'd call it Rich Eyes.