Great essay (Orwell) takes me back. I remember learning Lear (and the other 'tragedies') at Rutgers in a night class in a basement of one of those impersonal br

Great essay (Orwell) takes me back. I remember learning Lear (and the other 'tragedies') at Rutgers in a night class in a basement of one of those impersonal brutalist buildings that sprung up in the 70s to replace 'quonset' huts in central Jersey by the Raritan. Inauspicious looking place to learn Shakespeare but was a class that really stuck with me. The language and structure of "Lear" spin out of control and loose meaning - so by the end one of the more sympathetic characters becomes speechless after saying something to the effect of - "Is this the promised end/ or the image of that destruction?/ fall and cease". IOW: 'is this the apocalypse? there is nothing more to say or do...' It doesn't bother me that Tolstoy thought Lear was garbage. I can see his point from his perspective. He had a different mind and different education from anything I could imagine. And he was fundamentally smarter than I am so I respect that. I think though I respect Shakespeare more and part of what he is doing in "Lear" is showing the heartbreaking limits of the mind when facing a reality that no longer makes sense. I realize even from the relatively privileges perspective of one educated in dank basements of a decent US public university that I know much less about literature and philosophy than a comparably educated compatriot of Tolstoy (and much, much less than Tolstoy himself). Even in my reading he is nto wrong. Lear in the tradition of tragedy is a broken play. I am not sure that makes it bad... The end of Lear renders everyone in the play dead or shattered, mute. We as the audience, receive that and go on. That gulf is awesome. Much is lost and it is almost magical that we go on. And this fracturing and re-wholing goes on. An old story - the "Tower of Babel", etc This gets rewritten - Huidobro, Faulkner, Julio Cortazar, and Beckett come to mind but I am lazy and years away from lit study. Writers that see a epoch passing (for better or worse) and are in the lacunae where meaning is exhausted and we are speechless and exhausted. Like Beckett ends his trilogy ``` It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on. ``` There are echos of Lear everywhere. I hate the weakness of relativism but I feel a humbleness wrt the greats - I reach into the bag of marbles and pull out a Sappho, LaoTze, TSEliot, Hegel and read something out of context and in translation. In the back of my mind I realize there is much I would never understand the gulf of experience. They are all failures: most drunk or unstable, leaving fragments that we puzzle over.