JOLLY DAYS

Undiscover'd Country

The news is filled with terrible death. Bhutto's assassination and the unease we now feel about the tipping point Pakistan has reached; the surreal story of a young California man killed and his two friends mauled by a tiger escaped from a zoo ; a neighbor's story (not to be delineated here) evoking the fractures in families that death can catalyze into visibility; an indigent man we know telling us of his son's death — a pall lingers over this season.

You could say that it is always happening, you just don't hear of it. But it makes a difference when you do.

Christopher Hitchens about Bhutto:

This is what makes her murder such a disaster…She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. …she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.

And then there are the inevitable doubts. Bhutto was physically courageous, but was she also suicidal? Was the tiger attack partly the result of taunting by the teens? Clearly, taunting does not warrant so horrible an end; nor is Bhutto's courage diminished — nor the hope she presented and the credit Hitchens ascribes to her possible growth — to be denied. Things are never simple.

One of fevered Hamlet's many skeptical queries of the persistent spirit — is it only fear that makes us able to overcome despair?

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

And in Measure for Measure we are reminded of the glory of existence in the human capacity to express our deepest fears through art:

To be impison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.

The pendant world — a world itself dangling with fragility.