3.4 KiB
| title | author | type | date | url | categories | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| <cite class="play">Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</cite> | Ben | quotes | 2020-07-11T15:32:14+00:00 | /quotes/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead/ |
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You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching…
Player
Guil
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s.
Player
Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special.
Guil
But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do!
Player
Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.
[Death is] just a man failing to reappear, that’s all—now you see him, now you don’t that’s the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back—an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.
Guildenstern
Ros
We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guil
No, no, no…Death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.
Ros
I’ve frequently not been on boats.
Guil
No, no, no—what you’ve been is not on boats.
Ros
But what’s the point?
Guil
Don’t apply logic.
Ros
He’s done nothing to us.
Guil
Or justice.
Ros
It’s awful.
(Quietly) Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…
Guildenstern