This week is like Ruben's favourite thus far. He finally gets to Shakespeare, and need he mention that Thoreau is pretty brilliant too? Yea yea, Ruben doesn't do any of his readings but this week is different!
Ruben's love affair with Shakespeare (not the gay kind) began as an accident of sorts when he was about 7? His aunt dumped some of her old Shakespeare texts which she used back in like... the 1970s on him and he just started reading them. He remembers reading A Midsummer's Night Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and The Tempest and knowing a poop about them cos the words were so queer and strange and Ruben could not make head or tail of them.
Nonetheless he had developed a keen interest in Shakespeare back then. So SJI, YJC and all that occurred and I guess it was in Ruben's depressed state, when things weren't going so great on the relationship side and all that he turned back to Shakespeare, and more specifically, the Sonnets. Ruben immersed himself in them in an attempt to escape from the world, from the sadness and depression that engulfed his life. It was also then that he looked inward and started to write, and Thoreau's ideas really resonated with Ruben and his life experiences.
But first the Sonnets, gosh the meaning they held to Ruben were so dear, like a person on life support! Love, what was this love people spoke of? His family didn't seem too loving, parents argued too much and life was going in a downward spiral. Love, a desperation and a struggle, the eternal war between the mind and heart. Does one go head first into this idea of Love? Or should one apply a detached Love? Can beauty be appreciated from afar without an expression of one's Love? All these dense thoughts ran through Ruben's arguably damaged skull for years and still do. But he came to one conclusion that seemed definite and defining thus far.
That Love is just an ideal, there is no perfect Love, no triumphant victory of the heart and expression. The Love we humans are capable of is an imperfect one. Ruben also realised that it is the imperfections of the way we Love, that actually make us so unique, a flawed perfection that transcends any ideal because of it's paradoxical nature. It is something that any human can identify with and yearn for. It is a need, and human needs are never perfect. Our baser instincts often override our elevated thoughts and dreams. This was what Shakespeare was going at in Ruben's opinion and the cyclical nature of the Sonnets and the recurring themes of frustration just serve to exalt the ideal of a perfect, untarnished Love that can never exist.
Which kind of overlapped with Ruben's thoughts on Transcendentalism, the very idea of literature surpassing the bodily confines into the realm of ideals. A truth that Ruben sought for for such a long time was to be found in the teachings in a bare classroom in Yishun. But that was just how it was. He remembers how his tutor planted in him the very idea of transcending as a way - the way - of us humans validating ourselves and the ideals we strive for. Alas the very act of it is often in death, where our physical shell no longer binds us and shackles us to an imperfect body that can never fulfill the perfect dreams of the soul.
Obviously the writer has thought too much during two two-hour lectures today. Sigh.
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