Ophelia?

In a moment of short-sightedness, I gave away my set of Shakespeare's plays.  I don't know what kind of madness or idiocy possessed me to do it.  If there is anything a literate person ought to own, it is a complete set of Shakespeare.  It's probable that there is more than one edition somewhere in the plethora of books in Dad's study, so I will bring them home with me after my next trip to the house.  The plan was to go to the house in Connecticut this Sunday and Monday, but a super-collider perfect storm of historical proportions is said to be bearing down on the entire Eastern seaboard.  Sandy, as she is called, is currently a hurricane moving north after destroying parts of Cuba and Florida.  She may be downgraded (we can only hope) to tropical storm status by the time she reaches New England.  The prospect of yet another tree limb falling on my father's car or roof is not one I care to contemplate.  My first and automatic reaction to the weather news was, What about Dad? Do I need to go and get him if the power goes out, as it always does in Mansfield/Storrs during a hurricane?  But then I remembered that Dad was no more, and instead of feeling relief, I felt pain at the loss of him.

To return to Shakespeare:  After my father's death I found myself trying to remember Ophelia's speech upon discovering that her father had been slain.  I could only remember the last few words, so I am about to look it up on Google.

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 29-32)

White his shroud as the mountain snow.
Larded with sweet flowers;
which bewept to the grave did go
which true-love showers.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 37-39)

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And on his grave rains many a tear,-
Fare you well, my dove!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 164-166)

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.

His beard as white as snow,
All flaxen with his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 23-26)

As it turns out, it is not a speech, but a series of songs that the grief-maddened Ophelia sings.  Some of them are (strangely) bawdy, describing a maid who loses her virginity.  (This may be a reference to Hamlet's rejection of her love.)

But most of the songs she sings refer to the death of her father, the foolish old man Polonius,  the object of Hamlet's contempt, but whom he never intends to kill.  Believing that his uncle was concealed as he was listening behind a curtain,  Hamlet runs his sword into the interloper, only to find out that it is Polonius he has killed.

I am not going mad with grief,  but I am not in my right mind.  At times I wish I didn't have to go on living.  Teaching has become an almost impossible task, and practicing is sporadic at best.  I have the feeling that I might blow away in the breeze, similar to Holden Caulfield's fear that he would step off the curb to cross the street and disappear.  My therapist, whom I saw this morning, assured me that there is no pathology in my behavior.  It's simply normal grief.  My anxieties are not likely to convert to mania, as I have been fearing. 

My father's image (as he used to look, fortunately) repeatedly springs to mind, as does his voice, speaking remembered phrases such as, 

I am working on my Magnum Opus, which, sadly, was never completed.  He was a thinker, a talker, and a gifted teacher, but he was not a writer.  At least, not a writer of books.  He wrote extensive notes in the margins of books, on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper, and in blue examination books--I found a foot-high stack of them under his desk, and more still thrust between books on the shelves.  I collected all of these notes in case someone wanted to put them all together in a volume called The Literary and Philosophical Genius of Jack Davis, or something of the sort.  Jerry Shaffer would be the obvious choice to put together the observations and ruminations of my father.  But he took one look at the rapidly mounting stack of my father's papers and demurred.  Still, they must be saved for posterity.  The task of editing and publishing them will not fall to me, as I have my own writing to nurture.

"The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the first sentence of Anna Karenina, and the first paragraphs of À la recherche du temps perdu are among the greatest in literary history." They are as follows: 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

For a long time, I went to bed early.

My father loved to read aloud--he was a frustrated actor and would use different voices and accents, especially when reading Dickens, as he did to my brother and me as children, and to my mother, to whom he also read the complete works of Proust, Trollope, and Colette. When I was about ten years old he began to read Jane Austen, George Eliot, and other classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Way of All Flesh, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, and Madame Bovary in translation (I read it in French years later in college as a French major.)  He also read aloud the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays) Auden, Yeats, e e cummings, T.S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.  All of these readings were accompanied by explanations of the text, which more often than not contained concepts foreign and difficult to a child, as well as vocabulary words not found on my fifth-grade spelling tests.

Dad also insisted that I learn Latin, starting me out at twelve with Latin grammar, followed by Latin class in junior high right up to my junior year in high school, by which time I had read Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, and Virgil's Aeneid.  He also supervised my study of French and Italian, the latter language prior to our family trip to Italy in 1967.  You could say, as my brother observed at the memorial last week, that we were both home schooled.  It's true that certain subjects such as math, science, and social studies were neglected in favor of art, music, literature, foreign languages, and some history.  At the time (especially during my teen years) I was less than thrilled and grateful for this intensive education, but as an adult I realize how unusual and valuable it was.

Thank you, Dad.