Today is officially the 461st anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare . . . who I assume needs no introduction.

His birth date is estimated because the only existing record is his baptismal certificate, which was issued on April 26th, 1564, and it was customary at the time for babies to undergo baptism three days after birth.

I readily confess to being addicted to Shakespeare, though not to the entirety of his works . . . I haven’t enough patience to have read them all (though I can still recite about half of Lady Macbeth’s mad scene, and a good part of Marc Antony’s speech at Julius Caesar’s funeral, which tells you a lot about my high school experience).

But so many of today’s better-known aphorisms derive from his writing: “there’s method to his madness”; “to thine own self be true”; “neither a borrower nor a lender be”; “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; and so on, ad infinitum.

And as I complete my second full day of detox, still struggling to avoid immersing myself too deeply in the world’s news of the hour, I find myself contemplating one of my favorite of the Bard’s passages, from Macbeth (Act V, Scene 5):

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

And now you can understand why I’ve taken these mental health days: I find myself wondering whether Macbeth might have been correct . . . that we’re here on earth for such a short time, we learn nothing from the past, and then we’re gone and forgotten . . . that, in the end, it’s all a lot of meaningless noise.

Wow! I really will need a few more days . . . because I don’t want that to be true. I don’t want to exit the stage and be heard no more. I want to leave something behind, to be remembered for having contributed a little something . . . even if it’s only this blog.

And so I will now enter the next phase of my recovery: happy reminiscences. Until one morning, I will wake up to the sound of a news flash arriving on my phone, glance at it without thinking, and find my righteous anger once more stirred to the point of irresistibility.

And I’ll know for sure . . .

In the meantime, I’ll see you tomorrow with the first of my flashbacks — this one about growing up Jewish in 1940s New England.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/23/25