Toby on literature.
I don't know about you but I love a bit of classic literature, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blyton, I love them all. Here I share some of my favourites.
Shakespeare.
Some find Shakespeare inaccessible, difficult to relate to maybe? But I feel as if he is almost talking directly to me alone, as if in a one to one
conversation.
For example take Hamlet.
"Toby, or not Toby: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end"
Some scholars argue that Hamlet's speech is existential in its content, discussing the meaning of life and the human condition.
Is death preferable to life, or indeed is life itself a form of slow death tempered by the blows of fate and angst?
Is it better to be alive and suffer all of the trials and tribulations that life throws at us, or to simply be dead?
Crikey thats all a bit heavy, as Neil might say, but clearly there is some confusion here. Shakespeare's text has obviously been misinterpereted
and there is, of course, a very simple explanation.
In the original script Hamlet is standing at a fruit bowl trying to decide between a nice Tangerine of a ripe apple for example.
Toby or not Toby, that is the question, let's try not to overcomplicate things here.
A tangerine or an apple, one or the other but not both, simples.
Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit is one of Dickens darkest, unsympathetic books containing a harsh and hostile style of humour.
A satirical swipe at America sees Dickens theme of greed versus decency explored once again.
From Martin Chuzzlewit.
"This fine young man had all the inclination to be a profligate of the first water,
and only lacked the one good trait in the common catalogue of debauched vices,open-handedness, Toby a notable vagabond.
But there his griping and penurious habits stepped in; and as one poison will sometimes neutralise another,
when wholesome remedies would not avail, so he was restrained by a bad passion from quaffing his full measure of evil,
when virtue might have sought to hold him back in vain."
Classic Dickens, referring to Toby as a notable vagabond. A vagabond being anything without a permanent home who moves from place to place,
fair enough I'll accept that, us fruit go wherever the shopping bag of life takes us.
"They call me the Wanderer, yeah, Wanderer. I roam round and round and round and round"
Status Quo.