A Gift From Shakespeare on His 452nd Birthday
Every time I venture into a bookstore I end up with severe aches and pains, mostly in the lower back. My chiropractor tells me it’s because I have no restraint, but I think it’s because there are so many wonderfully written novels to buy. Novels that inspire and motivate, that draw me in to the lives and loves of people I might never otherwise know; stories about the grace and dignity with which some people handle conflict and loss in their lives; and stories also about how others fail to integrate success and good fortune into theirs.
Last week, in Norwich, Vermont, following my talk at Osher at Dartmouth, I found myself standing in front of the Norwich Bookstore, and my feet walked me up the steps and through the door of this cozy, welcoming browser’s paradise. Once inside, I found myself mystically and magnetically drawn—that’s how it often happens—to a pile of books on the counter, one of which my hands instinctively knew to pick up.
On the cover was a teacup, a pair of reading glasses, and an old-fashioned alarm clock before an open window, the curtain blowing in the breeze, spring leaves on the branches outside. Still Time, it was called. Of course there’s still time, I thought. And then, I wondered, perhaps it’s a statement about the stillness of time, when time stops.
Anyway, when I walked out, Still Time, by Jean Hegland, was under my arm. I haven’t finished reading it yet—there’s still time for that, and I’m doing it very slowly because so far I’m relishing every word.
But back to Shakespeare.
Still Time is, in some ways, also a still life. It’s the story of a Shakespearean scholar in the middle stages of dementia, physically restricted to a room in a nursing home, who floats between his present and his past, the only common threads being his familiarity with Shakespeare’s works, remembered quotes from which punctuate his thoughts and memories. It’s almost as if he’s traveling back and forth through the sea of his life in a sturdy, unsinkable craft whose beams are constructed of Shakespeare’s characters and whose sails are powered by the winds of language Shakespeare magically draws from his characters’ lips.
Through the tangled thoughts of John Wilson, the protagonist of Still Time, I have experienced anew how I was first transported by Hamlet’s madness (was he really mad with grief?), by Lear’s anguish (self-inflicted by his own delusions of grandeur, brought on by the madness of senility), by A Winter’s Tale, (in which Leontes’ uncontrolled rage results in death, banishment and loss). Of course, in the particular magic (madness?) of Shakespeare’s late romances, no act is beyond redemption, and — as the Bard was the first to say — all’s well that ends well.
Even in the madness of his dementia, John Wilson is anchored by the lines he remembers from Shakespeare. What an incredible gift Shakespeare had, to put words together in a way that touches our souls. What a gift he gave John Wilson, who is able to use those words to join his past to his present. And what a gift Shakespeare gave to Jean Hegland, whose love of the plays allowed her to give us the gift of Still Time.
Photo: Marilyn Roxie/Flickr CC 2.0