Friday, February 3, 2012

Certainties

I'll offer two (of the above):

Shakespeare, as actor, discovered what all good, or even just competent actors discover - that you genuinely start to feel the feelings you are enacting. Which led him to an oddly disconcerting corollary. Your feelings may never be something quite genuine but always have a sense of enactment about them. So all the world becomes a stage.

United for the Premiership by a comfortable margin. The noisy neighbours to choke.

(I'm working on pure intuition here, guys.)

2 comments:

Trebuchet said...

It's a bit like C S Lewis's fable of the ugly fellow who wore a beautiful mask. One day the mask fell off, and they found he'd become beautiful. I feel that way about many IB students; yeah, the methods we use are sometimes downright reprehensible, but the students gain confidence anyway and some become beautiful. :)

And no, I was talking about Shakespeare, action and enactment, not the Mancunian titanomachy...

Brian Connor said...

I have been known to advise students to fake being sophisticated, educated, adult readers in their essays on the grounds that, by some peculiar alchemy, they might just effect that transformation if they learn to fake it well enough.

But I would never advise them to employ the word titanomachy. That can only work in the hands of a true master.