Tuesday, December 11, 2018

So The Guy Says Back To Me (See Below)

In a nutshell.  King Lear is not about the desolate nature of things.  It portrays the desolation of King Lear, which though a fiction, deeply moves audiences beacuse they feel it too, or not.  End of story.  Most people who try to write such a story will turn our pure laughable dreck.  Which is why we value Lear.  It touches us.  How Sh. manages this is that he, to quote the very funny Coleridge on poetry, the poet puts "the right words in the right order."  What that means is the words lead one to imagine the soul of the being who speaks them.  That is how we follow the story, and why we care.  There is no moral, though I don't see why "things are desolate" is not a moral.  Nothing one learns from Lear will help avoid such a fate.  Nor should one perhaps even wish that, since it would mean being anaesthetized.  Maybe great literature overcomes the anaesthization of the soul--for a moment, then back to business. One does not of course need lit for that, but it feels good and so one seeks it out.  

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