I finished reading "The Tempest" last night. I enjoyed it very much (I know I have never seen it produced, but Prospero's summoning of the spirits towards the end is very familiar - I'm sure I've heard that recited somewhere). It still does not QUITE displace "Twelfth Night" as my favorite Shakespeare play, but it comes very close. (Perhaps seeing a production of it would change my opinion.)

I was casting about for what to read next. I had originally planned on reading "Hamlet," seeing as not very many weeks ago I saw a production of it on campus. But now I see by the calendar that today is St. Crispin's day...which tells me that perhaps Henry V should be the next one to read.

(I know very little of the play aside from the famous speech:

"This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...

)

So it seems apropos. Also, I think I am more in the mood right now to read of heroism and sacrifice* than I am to read of what is (essentially) a dysfunctional family with a broody, indecisive main character.

(*Yes, I know: one reading of the play is as an anti-war allegory. I'll make up my mind when I actually read it.)

(I'm sure there's a considerable body count in Henry V, but somehow it's different when someone "dies in battle" in a play, than when they're all sprawled dead because of family dysfunctionality (stabbed or poisoned or both) across the stage at the very end. Or at least I tend to think so.)

And once I finish the two "non fiction" works I am reading, I am going to begin reading that book I bought over my break, about the real-life storm that apparently inspired "The Tempest."

The two books are "The Victorian Internet," which is VERY good and is far more interestingly written than "Jacquard's Loom," and "We Took to the Woods," which is Louise Dickinson Rich's account of her family's WWII era stint living in a cabin in the Maine woods...I admit that running away to a cabin in the woods is a fantasy of mine, but I know intellectually that I would probably go mad were I that isolated (living in a cabin alone). Rich talks about the real risk of going "woods queer" - a sort of stir-craziness that comes from spending too much time alone and not getting Outside, "Outside" being the larger world of shops and towns. I do think I'd be at risk of going "woods queer" - I know if I spend even a couple days - like during a school break - by myself too much I tend to brood and focus inappropriately on small things (Rich cites an example in herself, where she became overly agitated by the loss of a particular pencil she favored). The other thing that would stay my hand from running off to the woods is what I might call the running-water issue. In the Rich's home, there was no running water: drinking water had to be hauled from a well, people bathed using water heated on the stove (I tried that in 2007 when my hot water heater went out; it's a rather unpleasant effort). And they used an outhouse.

That in itself is enough to keep me in town. I have commented here before that I don't camp. Part of that is I sleep badly away from my own bed, even if I am staying in a halfway-decent hotel. But sleeping in a sleeping bag, on the ground, surrounded by allergens and (as has always been the case the few times I tried camping) with a cold rock that shows up under my sleeping bag somewhere in the vicinity of the small of my back in the middle of the night. The other reason I don't like to camp is the bathroom issue. Unless I deliberately starve myself of fluids after 4 pm, I will have to get up at least once during the night. And if you're having to trot off to a pit toilet (or worse, a latrine you yourself had to dig), well...

I know, that sounds picky and excessively "soft" and that as an ecologist, I should not be bothered by the discomforts of camping. But I am. I prefer to sleep in a nice bed, with a toilet a few steps down the hall AND hot water in which to wash my face the next morning.

So anyway: cabin in the woods, nice thing to dream about, but most likely not ever going to happen.