We went to see a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest last night, put on by the students here at Williams.  It was a fine performance.  Prospero was aloof and callous, Caliban was Gollum-like in his torment, and Ariel was airy and angular.  The drunkards stole the show. 

    It had been a long time since I last encountered this play, and I noticed anew last night the Taoist resonance in Prospero’s lines in Act 4, scene 1:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

 The image of the insubstantial dissolving brought Chuang Tzu to mind (no, not the butterfly dream…):

We set out like ingenious machines declaring yes this and not that.  Or we hold fast like oath-bound warriors defending victory.

We can say that to fade away day by day is to die like autumn into winter.  But we’re drowning, and nothing we do can bring any of it back.  We can say this drain is backed up in old age, full and content, but a mind near death cannot recover that autumn blaze.

Joy and anger, sorrow and delight, hope and regret, doubt and ardor, diffidence and abandon, candor and reserve; it’s all musing rising out of emptiness, mushrooms appearing out of mist.  Day and night come and go, but who knows where it all begins?  It is! It just is! If you understand this day in and day out, you inhabit the very source of it all.

      Of course, much – indeed, most – of the story is rather un-Taoist in the play of ego and revenge and manipulation.  So maybe someone who knows Shakespeare better than I can answer me this: why is it that Prospero turns away from being an "oath-bound warrior" and forgives those who deceived him in the past?  How is it that he is able to get free from his anger and rage and inhumanity?