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Saturday, May 15, 2010

All the World's a Stage...

Marilla & Anne


It's been said, and it's been enlarged on:  I personally feel "facts" are nothing but supernumeraries and props around which we trace the outlines of reality. Having said this, the very nature of these props themselves become suspect, and seem to me to be ideas I just do not seem to re-visit very often; I just leave them the way they are and my neglect is interpreted as ontological solidity; essentially, they exist because I do not think about them (very much).

Case in point:  when the young Russian orphan was sent home alone by airplane by his adoptive mother in Tennessee. In this story, barely two months old, the adoptive mother justified her "return" of the young boy - as if he were a pair of shoes being sent back to Zappo's - by saying he had behavior problems far beyond the ability of her dealing with.

She said that he at least once threatened to burn down their house with everyone in it.

Interestingly enough, the film Anne of Green Gables  (1934)  was playing in the background this morning, and we had reached the spot where Mrs. Blewett visits Marilla, and says she has heard that Marilla and Matthew were adopting a young boy from the orphanage.
Mrs. Blewett tells a seemingly recent story where Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So adopted a young fellow from an orphanage... and he burned down their house with everyone inside !


All the World's a Stage, and there's only a few scripts... and not too many copies, so we have to share them among ourselves... and even so, we stand there dumb, frantically whispering:   Line !

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

An elegant way--you know of no other, I suspect--of saying what goes around comes around, a truism that lives up to its name.

Montag said...

Well, I'm not sure. I usually don't deal with truisms - I hope. I meant to indicate we have a limited repetoire of ways of looking at the world, and we repeat them over and over like hack writers, and that sort of shows why our reality is so impoverished.