Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to
nothing so fitly as to a whale; a' plays and
tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such whales have I heard on o' the land, who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.

-First Fisherman

Pericles, Prince Of Tyre                      Act II, Scene i, Line 34

Hoo boy, that’s not even a bunch of lines. It’s just a big old paragraph! But it’s a good one. What do we call the lines (or a paragraph) that are trying to say something meaningful about life in general, and can be taken fully on their own and apart from the story of the play. This is as opposed to lines that are just dialogue of what’s going on in the play? Well there must be a word for it, and certainly most of our Totally Random lines are the latter. I guess I’ll have to pass on what that word is for now and just tell you that we’ve got one of those lines (or paragraphs) today.

So what's it trying to say? Well, the first fisherman is comparing the way that whales eat up everything in their path to the way that some of the mighty and powerful men devour everything, and I suppose everyone, in their paths. And I believe this speaks to income disparity and the one per centers. The fisherman is probably talking about the rich guys or maybe the royalty. Or is he talking about the clergy. I don’t know. We’d have to do a lot more work with this particular play to figure out more specifics on this.

But no matter, because we can see the relevance of the line to today’s world. At least I can. Isn’t it funny how we tend to look at today’s problems and somehow think that they are unique to our times. The fact is that usually they’re not. And certainly this issue is not. Here’s an idea: why don’t we go back to Will’s time, or for that matter any past time, and find some of our current day problems to see how it turned out. Maybe that way we'd get some ideas about some smart things to do. But we won’t do that. Why? Because that’s how history manages to repeat itself. It’s the old maxim (hey, is maxim the word I was looking for earlier?): History repeats itself because nobody listens the first time. Or the second, or the third…

Bob pulled up outside my window at work today and I thought it was a funny picture. I wonder is Bob is a one per center? What do you think?