April readings, part 1

Sonnets 18, 60 and 73 by William Shakespeare are a collection of Elizabethan texts on aging, death and the overcoming of time. The term "Elizabethan" must not be seen as limiting these sonnets' potential to convey in a both broad and deep manner the rich subtleties of a perception which stretches far over boundaries of epoch and literary tradition. Together, the texts are a good sample of how inclusively Shakespeare was able to both consider and communicate the experience of ephemerality and change. Each sonnet a particular universe of image and metaphor, the three of them suggest that beauty, art and ultimately poetry are the key to rise above time.

While the Sonnets sing against the deleterious effects of the hours by focusing our vision on the image of the beloved, Psalm 39 is the voice of a man who turns to himself and finds it difficult to truly become conscious of his own finitude. Nevertheless, he seeks shuch a conscience because of his own wickedness, and finds contemplating his frailty to be the only cure to his anguish. The possibilty of death, then, and not death itself, becomes the point of relief for this singer's journey into not being. Hoping on the Eternal, here, is the way to overcome time: the consciousness of one's transitoriness as the way for eternity to manifest presently while one is still under time's influence.

[suggested reading for April: Shakespeare's sonnets 18, 60 and 73; Psalm 39, from The Bible]