One of the principal thrills of undergraduate study is the titillation of pushing the envelope – of becoming learned with one foot still planted firmly in the realm of childish bashfulness. I recall, for instance, school newspapers in undergrad that looked like their mainstream counterparts, but which featured foul language and spoke of lascivious happenings. The impressionable eighteen-year-old I then was – but thought I wasn’t – was stricken by the thumb-nosing of The Gargoyle at UofT. So too now with Obiter Dicta; and more assuredly so. And so, with the tacit blessing that twenty-somethings grant other twenty-somethings, I proffer this unhinged reflection on the whole mess which we call living in the 21st century.
My previous piece detailed what I consider to be an entirely tongue-in-cheek philosophy. ‘Bombadilism’, as I termed it, was the gregarious party-host incarnate. Bombadilism is the party-host who delightedly parades you about the room by the hand to introduce you to everyone else. What I neglected to make explicit in my previous piece was the general attitude of surrender. To be a gracious guest in the host’s company is to bid farewell to one’s ego, and especially one’s sense of propriety and order. Every invitation is to resignation. The party guest is the mortal whose agency and individuality are gleefully squashed in the battle against the capriciousness of society, of the party host.
Yet, it is with a perverse joy that the party guest displaces identity. Many of us are familiar with this feeling and acknowledge the duplicitousness about it all. On the one hand we bemoan being made into a spectacle, bandied about as a display to others; those whose acquaintance may or may not advance whichever grand scheme we happen to be plotting for ourselves that season. Still, we enjoy the limelight and cannot help but adore the centrality of our being in that moment. Every gaze met is an intoxication far more powerful than that of the drink in our hands. This is what I refer to as being ‘Hamletesque’.
The eponymous Hamlet of Shakespeare’s masterpiece is a dishonest lush and his disposition mirrors our 21st century reality to our frightening degree. We have, by the artful design of corporations of unprecedented magnitude, embraced a new solipsism in which we are reminded that each of us is a victim of circumstance. This is the flipside of the bacchanalian delight we enjoy when the spotlight is on. Yet, it too is a perverse joy. To evince greater misery is to bespeak a deeper and fuller feeling. We subsist on the perfunctory amelioration of fabricated misfortunate. Now, in the twisted twenty something years since 2000, the technology to which we cling has created a world of two-way mirrors. Now more than ever we have become performers and our own sycophants. We each harbour a nearly intractable paranoia. We are each of us Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who spends his idle moments fawning over his own misery, glorifying its ascendance like a rising star. Hamlet is indistinguishable from romanticized, as are we, the denizens of the 21st century. Like kings and queens of old, we regard each disturbance as a revolutionary calamity and consequences that outpace our capacities greatly.
Do not think that I am impugning others and not myself. No. I am intimately acquainted with the sort of thinking that I am here describing. In the context of COVID particularly, and the sedentary existence it begets, one cannot help but turn to contests of dissatisfaction. He whose sighs are loudest is deemed the most virtuous. I see no escape from this trap, as it attends directly to the spiritual organ responsible for situating our consciousness in a communal framework. Never before have we been so conscious of the experiences of others, and accordingly, the insuperability of so great a consideration drives us inward. Ironically then, to break free from this madness requires interaction of the sort that COVID restrictions disallow. The remedy to all of this is, not uncoincidentally, amiable interaction with others. Interactions stripped of a greater audience. Better to bow before the laws of an intimate cocktail party than the conceited diktats of some equally frightened ego in the city halls of the land. Unlike Fortinbras, they are no more exceptional than we are, and we know it. They too, perhaps exceptionally so, enjoy displays of mock humility, just as we do. Yet how do we check the uncheckable, when we cannot check ourselves?