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So, I’m still waiting at the starting gate to all that is about to begin in Stratford-upon-Avon. I’m waiting. I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time. We’re waiting on visas. We’re waiting on housing. We’re waiting.

While I wait I’ve been doing some reading, re-reading, and rethinking of what I’ve experienced up to this point in life. Do you do that? Probably you do. Maybe you are able to live in the here and now and not worry about past and future while you’re in the now. I have the tendency to perseverate. I’m not proud of it, I continue to try and work on this so that I can “let it go” but I find it difficult. Recently I was reading in preparation for classwork. I read a book that got me feeling all sorts of things. I finally started having an argument in the margins of the text with the author I was having so many visceral reactions to what was shared within the pages. I haven’t had a book do that to me in a long time. This one did. I’m not going to give the title as I don’t feel like it’s a book that deserves any more publicity than it already has. But what I did find, time and time again, is that the arguments were personal for the author and the justifications for life choices and literary interpretation we based on her own prejudices – are all of ours! But what I found most irritating was the lack of knowledge. Absolute assertions were made from her own ideas with no professional opinions to back them up. The certainty with which the ideas and declarations were written made me cringe and yell and write in all caps in the margins. “Me thinks s/he doth protest too much” to misquote the Bard (I do know that the actual quote from Gertrude is “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”). And as I continue to digest, or perhaps detox, the time with the book I have been thinking.

One of the big pieces for me was the journey of this author and the partner, eventual married partner. In the end, it seems, the author has had to change the partner in order to stay with said person so that the author can be fulfilled in the way that the writer wants (needs, according to the book). This has led me to Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove. 
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 
It is the star to every wand’ring bark, 
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. 
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle’s compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
If this be error and upon me prov’d, 
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

I first encountered this poem in high school. I probably read it and felt much like Marianne Dashwood from “Sense and Sensibility” – romantic feelings of what love ought to be but no real clue as to what love actually is. Later at uni in a Shakespeare class I thought I understood a little better. In my 30s taking an acting class that focused on Shakespeare I read it as monologue. The instructor rakes me over the coals with my interpretation. Who was I to know what love was? How could I, at 30+, know anything about love. I was devastated. I was also in a relationship that had me doing a lot to alter myself to fit what I thought was wanted from me. It was love, but it was not a love that could be sustained longer than it did. I don’t regret the time. I can’t regret when there was so much good that sprang from it. Now I look at this sonnet at 50. Yes, 50. I’m not afraid of that number or my age. I look at it again having read this book and having lived a lot between high school and now and it gives me pause. Love is not “if you love me you’ll….” Love is not so much of what I have spent years in therapy unwrapping and untangling. Love is not something that ought to cause you PTSD. Love is something I am still leaning into. Something that I still remind myself is more of loving through it all and yet still rather abstract.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. Maybe there are just posts that are rambles to eventually create clarity. That would be nice.

I will leave you with a link to Ben Crystal sharing Sonnet 116 in Received Pronunciation and then in Original Pronunciation. That’s a talk for another post – original vs received.