Re: Consummations

Subject: Re: Consummations
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 20:09:10 EST

Exactly. That's what I mean. Buddy is the `to be', Seymour is the `not to be'. It's never those who have committed suicide who are around to contemplate whether or not it was the right decision, but those who didn't. There are countless artists and other productive people who live out the significant portion of their lives, then for decades squander in mediocrity. It is they who must ultimately wonder - was it worth it? Would it have been better if I had just shuffled off this mortal coil? Like Nabokov's `waxwing slain through the false azure of the window pane' - slamming into the window in our world but passing imperceptibly into the next in spirit - Buddy is the one who hit the window, while Seymour is the one who kept going. 

---
Louise Z. Brooks
"Invention my dear friends is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple." - Willy Wonka

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000 18:08:21   Matt Kozusko wrote:
>Louise offers, of the latter day Seymour:
>
>> What we have here is nothing more or less than Hamlet's immortal question - to be or not to be.  
>
>I think what we have here--that is, within Buddy's implacable SAI
>theorizing--is precisely the opposite.  Hamlet speaks for the west;
>Seymour, in the post-Bananafish conception, speaks for the east. 
>Hamlet's decision (which, incidentally, should not be reduced to a
>matter of suicidal contemplation, since by the end of the soliloquy he
>has arguably shifted from musing over being and not being to killing
>or not killing) turns on fear of the unknown.  If the everlasting had
>not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter, he had done three acts
>ago, but since the potential ills of afterlife could conceivably dwarf
>those of the solid-soiled flesh, he's content to stick it out. 
>Seymour, on the other hand, knows where he's going, and he is in a
>fantastic hurry to shuffle off.     
>
>-- 
>Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu
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