Meaning and Mortality

In "The Bacchae" Pentheus is dismembered by the Maenads due to his inability to recognize the divinity of Dionysus and instead relegates the fertility rites of his followers to mere spectacle.  Life in modern America does much the same to us.  

Living lives of "consumers" recognizes little more than our corporeal need for food, clothing and shelter and ignores the deeper needs of individuals to connect with each other and their world on a meaningful level.  With the advent of television, and now portable media in the form of tablet computers and smartphones, we are encouraged to further alienate ourselves from one another even within our own households. 

Where does this end?  What is the remedy for the seemingly overwhelming pressure to look outward instead of inward?  Literature offers us a world of insights into our own nature as human beings and can allow us to connect with each other through the

archetypal stories of birth, death, intitation, loss of innocence and so on.  The wealth and breadth of human experience is available through the writings of the worlds great authors.  

Great authors share unique and powerful insights in to the nature of existence through their stories.  The careful reader will find a world of advice and direction in the stories, plays and poetry of these wise artists.  Look around in modern media and you will see Shakespeare rearing his head over and over again, decade after decade and generation after generation.  This is precisely because while time changes the circumstances we live in, the basic narrative of a human life does not.  This of course leads us to Hamlet.

Why is Hamlet one of the most widely performed plays in human history?  Precisely because in the character of Hamlet we see our selves.  His struggles with himself become the visible manifesation of our own inner turmoil.  The conflicts that threaten to tear apart his world also threaten our own.  So in contemplating Hamlet and his plight, we can see that we are not alone in our sorrows, that indeed everyone has troubles making sense of a semingly meaningless existence.  Perhaps the best we can do is to contemplate, reason, and medititate until we find solace that in our collective human struggle we are not alone.  Even though death lurks around every corner and is the final result of every human life, it should not, precisely for that reason, be feared.  It should instead serve as a motivation to live and act in the present for tommorrow may never come.

This is the great advice that Hamlet ultimately serves up in several acts and through many hours of contemplationa and riddling.  The insight that a good human life is not lived in fear, but is one that conquers fear and liberates the soul to take action.