The Hopeful Imagination of the Quixotic: Hear, Hear!

One of the greatest human foibles of all times is the speed at which we jump to conclusions, especially in regard to the actions of other people. I won't expound on the many psychological reasons we do this, but suffice it to say that criticizing other people's actions without looking at the facts or even offering support is among our top shortcomings, coupled with its concomitant hypocrisy. 

This post's new word provides an apt example of the vitriolic flak we give to dreamers with big ideas, ideas we often criticize as unrealistic, foolish, and impractical. If this reminds you of a character with an impossible dream, you'd be spot on. Yes, it's Don Quixote, the title character of the great Spanish novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by  Miguel de Cervantes, a man given to unrealistic schemes and great chivalry. A famous Broadway musical, The Man of La Mancha was based on this novel, and the song "The Impossible Dream" is the one people remember most from it. The word? Quixotic, pronounced as it is spelled: [kwicks ah tik].

A quixotic person seems, on the surface, foolish and impractical as he or she pursues lofty ideals, perhaps even those that are capricious or unpredictable and yet imaginative and hopeful. His or her actions may seem quixotic at first glance, but they may actually be the beginning of a brilliant idea, invention, career. In the end, an end that the average person may not have been able to envision, the dreamer may have been caught up in the pursuit of "unreachable" goals without regard to practicality and yet still succeeded. We all know a few of these dreamers.

I'll begin with my favorite, J.K. Rowling. When she wrote the first Harry Potter book, she was in a difficult financial state and a doomed marriage with a young daughter to care for. She wrote constantly, using her knowledge of mythology and the classics and never gave up. She dreamed big and failure did not break her. In her 2008 Harvard commencement speech, she focused on the fringe benefits of failure and the importance of imagination. She even used the word quixotic as she described the way too many people see dreamers with big ideas. Today J.K. Rowling is one of the most successful and beloved writers of fiction as well as one of the wealthiest women in the world.

Winston Churchill is another hero figure I admire, a man who was severely criticized for speaking the truth. Churchill believed all of his life was preparation for the big event to come, World War II. No one believed his prediction of the war. England was in a good state economically with Germany in 1935-36 and didn't want to destroy it. And of course, after the horrors of the first World War, no one in England was keen to become involved again. As it turned out, Hitler had other plans, Churchill became known as a wartime leader, and Germany lost the war and surrendered.

Oprah Winfrey was fired from her television job early in her career because her boss said she was unfit for television. Walt Disney was fired from his early job because he "lacked imagination." Colonel Sanders suffered a thousand rejections as he took his famous chicken recipe from restaurant to restaurant. It took Henry Ford years of struggling with bankruptcy, disputes with financial backers and people who simply didn't believe in his product before he was able to develop his famous Ford Motor Company in 1903. Elvis Presley was fired early in his career and told to go back to driving a truck, that his career as a singer was heading nowhere. Stephen King's first book Carrie was rejected thirty times by publishers and he threw it in the trash, only to be rescued by his wife and resubmitted to Doubleday.

We know these stories of the quixotic well, but our initial response is, yeah, but they're all famous. I have another story of someone not so famous.

I know a man whose dream was to get an education under the kind of duress that would cause most of us to knuckle under. At the age of four he was reading the London newspapers and watching Germany drop bombs on his city. In 1947, at the age of ten, he was head boy in an exclusive public school in England. In those days being head of the class was literal. His achievement put him in the first seat at the head of the class. What he couldn't have imagined was a rare, virtually unknown eye condition later named keratoconus, a condition in which the clear tissue on the front of the eye (cornea) bulges outward. There was no treatment for this diagnosis at the time, no prescriptive lenses that might correct it, and the head boy's grades began dropping because his eyesight was failing, especially in maths, his strongest subject. He finally left school at age thirteen and went to work in his grandfather's nursery. At age 18, when Britain was involved in so many uprisings in the world that the country needed more troops, he was called up to the British army. At age 20 when he left the army, contact lenses were just beginning to correct keratoconus and he was finally able to correct his vision. It was not until he was in his early thirties that he began studying on his own, with the help of a maths tutor, and attained the A-levels equivalent grades to go to university. He didn't stop there. After being granted a BCE in engineering in only three years, he went to South Africa to learn firsthand about structural engineering on the big dams and eventually earned a PhD. He ended his career as a lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK teaching Masters level earthquake engineering.

Despite what seemed like a hopeless disability and, as a young boy, surviving a war with Germany that ravaged his home--the UK raised his family home on the English Channel to prevent the Germans from occupying England, Patrick O'Connor never lost confidence in his goal of getting the education he needed to fulfill his dream.

Perhaps the way to wholeness may seem quixotic--impractical and unrealistic in the face of so many challenges that must first be met, but the impossible dream of Don Quixote is more than romantic and chivalrous. It is the source of hopeful imagination in which we see ourselves not as we are but as we can be.

Lollygagging: The Road to Good Health and a Longer Life

 

The word lollygag has an unsavory reputation in a world of self-oppressed workaholics, and yet what a bewitching thought it conjures up! The hypnotic appeal of  aimlessly setting aside life's demands is powerful enough to convince even the most diehard workhorse to change his or her ways.

Lollygag is an Americanism with unknown origin dating back to the post Civil War era, 1860-1865, a time when very likely few people thought lollygagging a productive pastime. 

When I was a little girl, my mother was intent on making sure I was busy all the time. Her favorite expression was a warning, "Lollygagging around won't get the job done!" With all due respect to the woman I owe my life to, I'm going to suggest that the opposite holds more truth than she imagined. Lollygagging in my book is the key to living a healthier and longer life.

There is overwhelming evidence from the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization as well as countless university scientists, including those in our own Houston, Texas Medical Center, that strongly indicates that the occurrence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) can be reduced by approximately 80% by making lifestyle changes. But let's look at the latest stats.

665,000 Americans (one in five deaths) die from heart disease each year. Compare that number to the UK: 63,000 a year, and to France: 120,000 heart attacks per year with 10% of victims dying within the hour. The prevalence of CVD in adults 20+ years of age and older is 49.2% overall and increases with age in both males and females.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 17 million people die annually as a result of CVDs.

An alarming statistic is that high income countries have a CVD rate of 38%, while low/middle income countries have a CVD rate of 28%. 80% of deaths in high income countries occur among those over the age of 60 compared to 42% in low/middle income countries. The five countries with the highest rate of heart disease are, in order, China, India, Russia, the U. S., and Indonesia.

Cardiovascular disease is the single largest cause of death in developed countries. Why? Don't we have great medical care and enough food and proper living conditions? We do and we don't.

Here's why: Eating habits, lack of exercise, smoking, and work related stress. An American Heart Association 2021 update reports three leading causes of CVD: high body mass index, high risk of diabetes, and smoking.

So, my friends, is the art of lollygagging beginning to sound pretty good right about now? Perhaps lollygagging might have had a bad rap in the past, say up until the 1990s, but not any more. Workaholics, listen up.

Take note of the benefits of this guiltless relaxation:

1. Slowing heart rate

2. Lowering blood pressure/breathing rate

3. Improving digestion

4. Reducing activity of stress hormones

5. Increasing blood flow to major muscles

6. Reducing muscle tension and chronic pain

7. Having more time to learn how/what to eat and learn the art of eating slowly

But we already know this, don't we. So why don't we take care of the business of our health. not to mention the massive financial burden of illness and health care that is placed not only on the government but on individuals? We have a choice. Can we exchange our unhealthy habits for healthier ones? I believe we can, and when we do, not only will we prevent life threatening illness but we will also have greater peace of mind: reading more, engaging in hobbies and sports, spending more time with family and friends, enjoying the beauty of nature, devoting time (finally) to all the activities we refused to make time for before--church, the theatre, the symphony, a cooking course or two, a vacation.

I'm ready to get this lollygagging show on the road. How about you? It's a life or death decision. Choose life!

Bardolatry: Making an Exception for the Latin Tutor Turned Poet

 

Since the 18th Century William Shakespeare has been known as the Bard of Avon, the word bard a common name for a poet. In 1901 the word Bardolatry was coined by George Bernard Shaw, the famed creator of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion and later My Fair Lady, in the preface to his collection Three Plays for Puritans. Now, most of us know the word idolatry--the worship of a person or thing, or a kinder definition, excessive admiration. So you're thinking....yeah, yeah, William Shakespeare, that hard to understand dude we had to read in high school....

But through the centuries (four to be exact), let's look at what the icons of literature have had to say about the Bard:

Samuel Johnson referred to Shakespeare's work as "a map for life."

In 1796 actor David Garrick read a poem at the unveiling of a statue of Shakespeare in Stratford, "tis he, tis he/the God of our idolatry."

The Romantic poets Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt described Shakespeare as "a transcendent genius."

Voltaire was the main promoter of Shakespeare's work in France.

Thomas Carlyle in 1840 wrote, "This King Shakespeare, noblest, gentlest, indestructible."

Today Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare "invented humanity."

Samuel Johnson wrote, "Shakespeare holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life."

Excessive idolatry from the greatest literary geniuses? No, I don't think so.

When I was a high school student, only one Shakespeare play was offered in my four year tenure there, and that was Julius Caesar, sans history of the play, the life of the playwright, or history of the Elizabethan/Jacobean periods. It was not until grad school that I had my first, albeit ineffectual, Shakespeare course. To this day I cannot remember anything about it, but the next summer I joined 23 English teachers across the U.S. to learn about the Bard at Royal Holloway College, University of London in Englefield Green, U.K. It was there and later in Stratford that my real Shakespeare education began.

When I was many years into my teaching career, I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Sidney Berger of the University of Houston who shared his expertise in verse speaking, the art of using the iambic pentameter to express more accurately the verse lines of Shakespeare's plays and poems, something like built-in directions for speaking it correctly.

Teaching Shakespeare and his play Twelfth Night for almost 20 years was no doubt the highlight of my long career, with student performances, a Twelfth Night party, guest early music performances by the Baltimore Consort, Kate Pogue's Original Pronunciation production of Julius Caesar, and a Shakespeare workshop with students conducted by the one and only Ben Crystal, London actor, writer, producer.

In this same time frame, I took a group of students and their families on a literary tour of England and Scotland. While in London we participated in an actor's workshop at the Globe Theatre and that evening we saw Twelfth Night there, performed as it might have been in 1602, an all-male cast with horse hair wigs and pasty white faces. My students had just finished studying Twelfth Night with me, and prior to the show they made a visit to the gift shop and purchased six replica Elizabethan coins so that their teacher could buy the best seat in the house....with a cushion, all symbolic of course. Back home, I added these coins to my Shakespeare Shrine already full of memorabilia, including a Shakespeare action figure a student thought I needed.

I was also the drama teacher for several years, and I used this opportunity to infuse Shakespeare once more. I wrote five plays for teenagers based on five of my favorite Shakespeare comedies. Troy Scheid of Main Street Theatre Kids at that time directed three of them, and I later published the collection under the title Shakespeare by Any Other Name.

When the bones believed to be King Richard III were found buried under a car park in England and later identified as the king, pathologist Dr. Sarah Hainsworth, part of the team to verify the authenticity of the find, came to Houston to speak about this remarkable discovery at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. To add to the celebration, my students were asked to perform their Elizabethan dances to the music of the Baltimore Consort that evening, all part of our study of Shakespeare.

Every detail of my Shakespeare classroom was aimed at one goal: I wanted my students to know and love Shakespeare as much as I did. Was this my form of Bardolatry? Perhaps, but excessive admiration? Let me just mention here that the word excessive is relative. Right? Sort of like the word enough. Enough said.

In May 2021 Penguin Random House, Vintage Books, published Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, a novel of the plague in 16th century Europe and of Will Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (Anne was called Agnes in her uncle's will), and their children. When I finally got my copy and began reading it, I was confused. The story never mentions William Shakespeare by name, and yet it does specify all of the other people in his life. But the reader soon learns who the young Latin tutor who falls in love with the farmer's daughter Agnes Hathaway is. He hates working for his bully of a father; he needs more excitement in his life, a proper job, and yes, he writes. He asks for Agnes's hand in marriage. Although they are handfasted, her stepmother refuses him. Agnes decides the only way to keep her man is to have his child, and the rest is history. They marry and live with the Shakespeare family, his parents and siblings. Will is unhappy with his life, this home situation in particular. He doesn't want to be a Latin tutor or a glovemaker like his father. Agnes realizes his distress and secretly arranges for him to work in London in the glove market for his father. This doesn't last--it's not Will's dream, and Will the Latin tutor becomes Will the playwright and actor on the London stage, ultimately The Globe. His plan is to have Agnes move to London with the children and live with him, but it never materializes.

The story is not without heartache and tears (this reader's, too). Agnes and their three children miss Will, who is gone for months, even a year at a time. Although he buys her New Place, the second largest house in Stratford, what the intuitive farm girl-herb collector-healer really wants is her husband.

Hamnet is not only the story of the plague and its victims, shutting down the London theatres, death snatching away loved ones in Stratford. It is also a tale that turns the iconic Shakespeare, the greatest writer the world has known, into a living, breathing, imperfect man who in the end grieves over the death of his son the way other parents have surely always done. This kind of pain makes it easy to forget it was fiction. I personally wept continually over the last three pages. (Wait for it.)

So you ask, what have you learned about Will Shakespeare, Bard of Avon, that contributes to your own Bardolatry? My answer is this--that the second-best bed left to Agnes in his will was the marriage bed and not a slight to his beloved wife, that the poet loved his family, that according to the human spirit that pulls us toward those heartfelt needs in all of us, he had to find his own way in life to be true to his brilliant indomitable calling. So little is known about William Shakespeare beyond legal and church documents. The fact that Maggie O'Farrell scrutinized copious records and archives that covered Elizabethan life, the theatre and the two families is confirmation enough to imagine what Will's personal struggles as well as his triumphs might have been. What we must remember, if the plays are truly a reflection of our own joys and sorrows, is that he was a man. Brilliant, but in the end he was just a man and this makes me love him even more. Excessive admiration? Not even close.