If We Were Villains

by M.L. Rio

PERICLES: Antioch, farewell! for wisdom sees those men Blush not in actions blacker than the night Will ’schew no course to keep them from the light. One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.

“I will refrain from telling you to take the tragedies any more seriously than the comedies. In fact, one might argue that comedy must be deadly serious to the characters, or it is not funny for the audience. But that is a conversation for another time.”

and the philosophy students (who were by far the weirdest but also the most amusing, prone to treating every conversation as a social experiment and tossing off words like “hylozoism” and “compossibility” as if they were as easily comprehensible

Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.

One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: What’s done is done.”

(It was that ponderous crouching demon Guilt. At the time I didn’t know him, but in the months to come he would climb onto my chest every night and sit snarling there, an ugly Fuselian nightmare.)

“Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, / Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.”

“True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

“The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent … He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.” I stop. Shrug. “You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”

I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in. No, it wouldn’t be the same. I couldn’t argue with that.

He was as much a bully in death as he was in life, a giant who left behind not an empty space so much as a black hole, a huge crushing void that swallowed up all of our comforts, sooner or later.

I shrugged. “You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.” I paused, just long enough that he might believe I hadn’t planned what to say next. “Or sometimes they drink too much and fall in the lake.”

“The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price, For a small vice.”

“You don’t have to answer the question, but I won’t withdraw it.”

“They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace.”

“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!”

“I don’t know, it’s like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway.”

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

“I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”

My martyrdom is not the selfless kind.