Pardon
him, sweet Timandra; for his wits
Are
drown’d and lost in his calamities.
-Alcibiades
Timon Of Athens Act IV, scene iii, line 88
Today’s random page number is only two pages on from
yesterday’s. If you recall, yesterday Timon was railing against his guests, and
after that he left Athens for good. Today he’s living in a cave in the woods
and Alcibiades comes along with a babe on each arm. Timon tells one of the
babes, Timandra, to stick with being a whore. No, that’s literally what he says:
Be a
whore still: they love thee not that use thee;
Give them diseases,
leaving with thee their lust.
Nice, huh? And that’s where Alcibiades comes in with today’s
line.
Now the thing is, this is a really good line that
encapsulates the play. Or at least it seems to. This is a play about a guy,
Timon, who has a good life and spends it throwing parties for all the up and
coming people in Athens. The problem is that none of these people are his friends.
They’re all a bunch of posers. So that when Timon runs out of money not a one
of them is willing to help him, which sends him into yesterday’s rant and
causes him to shun humanity altogether. But here’s the question: are his wits really drown’d, or
is he now seeing things more clearly than ever before.
You decide.
The only hard part about picking today’s song is picking it.
That is to say, there are about a zillion blues songs about people whose wits are drown’d and lost in his calamities.
I’m going to go with this one, not because it’s the best but
because it’s the first one I thought of. Actually, the only appropriate part is
the chorus, Oh, lonesome me. The rest
is just about a broken heart. But it’s blues none the less, and I thought
that Timon must be pretty lonesome living in that cave in the woods.
No comments:
Post a Comment