To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles? To die, to sleep, no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to. 'Tis a consummation devoutely to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream; Aye there's the rub that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the laws delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? For who would Fardels bare to grunt and sweat under a dreary life. But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born, no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscious does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickeled o'er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard, their current turn ary, and lose the name of action. Soft you now thy fair Ophelia, Nymph in thy orisions. Be all my sins remembered
The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.
We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?
