Savouring nuggets from literature

Foucault and Derrida are the philosophers I have often tried to read and always failed to comprehend. The only philosophical work I could understand well is Edward Said's Orientalism.

But Orientalism is a political (and philosophical) deconstruction of the conventional Euro-centric world view and narratives.

And the reason for my liking and understanding that work might be my antagonism against the typical colonial view that India and the rest of the world were civilised only because of colonialism.

'Whiteman's burden or civilising mission' is a convenient mask of the Europeans to hide the atrocities and genocides they perpetrated on the colonised people world over, especially the elimination of the entire Native American population.

While it is very tedious and tiresome to read and comprehend abstract philosophers, William Shakespeare gives us gems of down-to-earth philosophical insights in almost all his plays. The best example is Hamlet.

In the third scene of the Act I of the play, Polonius advices his son Laertes: "Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;/Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement./Neither a borrower nor a lender be,/For Loan oft loses both itself and friend,/And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry."

And when Hamlet says in scene two of Act III, "Give me that man/ Who is not passion's slave, and I will wear him/ In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart," we love him as everybody of us loves our own selves.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus tells Hippolyta in the first scene of Act V: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,/Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend/More than cool reason ever comprehends./The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact:/ One sees more devils than vast hell can hold— / That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,/ Sees Helen's beauty in' his lover..."

How true it is.

I know a schizophrenic lunatic who thinks all his relatives are devils working to destroy him. And I need not give you examples to show that every lover sees Helen's beauty in his lover.

All of us see it while in love; and when lovers are at loggerheads, each one sees devil in each other. And that might be the reason why Shakespeare makes Hamlet speak: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (Act II, scene 2).