In the face of unimaginable loss, finding consolation in Shakespeare
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
-- William Shakespeare, ``King Lear"
Every death is different. All death is alike.
Every grief is unique. All grief is universal.
No tragedy ever felt just like 9/11. No tragedy ever felt any different.
Five years is a long time in the news cycle; it is nothing for art. Five years after the fall of Troy, who knew there would be a Homer? So it feels too early to be looking for the ``Iliad" of 2001. We can't know yet which poem or story or play will speak to the ages for our age.
Instead, I hear echoes of our time in the masterpieces of time past. In tragedies that have nothing to do with the tragedy of Sept. 11, I find more solace than in all the news specials and documentaries and anniversary commemorations that, inevitably, we throw together at a time like this. I don't want the evening news right now. I want Shakespeare.
Specifically, I want ``King Lear" -- not because I want to make some clumsy link between the events of Sept. 11 and Shakespeare's theme of blindly misdirected power, but because ``Lear" speaks so articulately of inarticulate grief. Faced with the worst loss most of us can imagine -- the nearly averted death of a child -- Shakespeare's Lear is reduced, ultimately, to one unbearable and all-encompassing word.
``Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?" he cries to the body of his beloved Cordelia. ``Thou'lt come no more," he goes on, and then any attempt to understand the mystery of her death dissolves in the face of the eternal, awful, unavoidable fact of it:
``Never, never, never, never, never."
When Alvin Epstein spoke that line last fall, in the taut and powerful Actors' Shakespeare Project production that later traveled to New York, each ``never" fell with a kind of simplicity and finality that, for me, speaks more truly of human grief than a thousand flowery eulogies could.
We will never have enough words to express everything we feel about that dark and brilliant autumn day, that day when we noticed that the world was full of tragedy, as it always has been and always will be. Thank Shakespeare, then, for reminding us that sometimes, and perhaps especially at the worst of times, just one word is enough.
Louise Kennedy is the Globe theater critic. She can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 