Ay,
but not yet to die.
Desdemona
Othello Act
V, Scene ii Line 54
This is an odd little line. I know, you're probably saying 'well at least it's little!'
Now it seems that we spend quite a bit of time with Othello. And
that’s okay because it’s a pretty good play, at least from my perspective. And we’re
here in the last scene again and things are about to go downhill fast (things
have not unraveled to the point they were at the last time we visited this scene). Othello has decided that he’s going to kill his wife and has
informed her that she’s lying on her death-bed. For some reason she agrees that
it’s her deathbed, but not today it isn’t. So I’m not exactly sure why she
answers with today’s Totally Random line. It seems a little random indeed to
me.
In any event I read the whole last scene this morning and it’s
pretty interesting. Right at the end, when he is about to stab himself, Othello
makes a bit of a strange reference to a 'malignant and turban’d Turk' in, of all
places, Aleppo. I think it’s almost bizarre that of all the towns in the Mideast
that Will could have used for this last line that he picked one that is so
pivotal in today’s Mideast situation; and one that, like this play, is the scene of so much suffering. Some of Will’s stuff seems ageless by
design, and some by pure luck.
But I’ve strayed a few hundred lines away from today’s
Totally Random line, ‘Ay, but not yet to
die’. Tis a strange line. And of course the poor girl turns out to be
wrong. Right about the ‘Ay’, but
tragically wrong about the ‘not yet to
die,’ as Othello kills her a few lines further on. ‘Ay, but not yet to die.’
There’s something there that I’m missing. But what is it?
See that little white squiggle? That's the electric connection being made. This is a little thing that me and my buddy put together for his school science project. We sprayed some different combustible materials in a little container that we snapped into the round grey collar you see there. And then we snapped on the electric current to see which material was most combustible. Well we tried it a bunch of times and only got one explosion. The other times there was something missing, but we never quite figured out what. Sometimes you just can't figure out what's missing.
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