“This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” - Shakespeare (King Lear)
This is why words rule. Whether they were written today or 300 years ago, they are still alive breathing wisdom we can live. Way to go Shakespeare. Granted, it took my a couple minutes to interpret what the heck he was saying... But then I got it :)
Ok: This line was key, "as if we were... fools by heavenly compulsion". He's saying don't blame the sun and the moon for your issues and sins and flaws and troubles. Don't blame God. It's not by anything other than ourselves that we got lost and wander into the land of scape-goating and evasion of accountability. We need to keep ourselves on track by maintaining alignment with the Universe. The Divine doesn't deviate -it doesn't go anywhere and it doesn't lose it's way. We do. We do when we lose sight of it.
Very good breakdown of a tough text.
ReplyDelete12