"God's spies"

"And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies"

I was giving a talk the other day on the subject of King Lear.  (Yes, you lucky people, you get me free of charge where-as there are people out there who actually pay for my wit and wisdom!) Anyway, in checking something in the text I came across those two beautiful lines.  The words are spoken by the old King who, during the course of the play, is stripped, literally as well as metaphorically, of power, pomp, wealth, home and hearth and finally of his own wits.  Only when he is reduced to the very basest state of mere existence does he slowly come back to a reality to which he had hitherto been blindly unaware.  He slowly awakes to the presence of his favourite daughter who, in his earlier pride and anger, he had cruelly misjudged and banished.  But no sooner does redemption and reconciliation seem possible than fate, or a cold, uncaring cosmos, throws the dice again so that he and his daughter are taken prisoner. At last, seeing the world as it is, and both dismissive of its hardships and overjoyed at his daughter's presence, he goes willingly, happily, to prison and in an almost childlike speech he utters the lines above.

One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in playing Lear is to induce an audience to feel the pity that all plays require when they feature a tragic hero.  Lear is desperately unlikeable from the very beginning, in fact more than that, one actually despises him.  It is true that what he goes through is hideous to watch but part of our stony hearts believe that he more than deserves it, if only for his sins of excessive pride and anger, to say nothing of his stupidity.  Even so, what he suffers is severe by any standards.  I was standing in my conservatory a few days ago watching and hearing the rain hammering on the glass windows and roof and then it turned to hailstones and the noise was thunderous and I thought, yes, now I feel a little of what Lear felt, to be old and frail and thrust out onto the heath naked, no wonder he lost his sanity.  Even so, it is in the final scenes when the old man slowly comes up from his slough of despond that the actor, if he catches it right, can just do the trick of turning an audience's antipathy to sympathy, of opening their eyes in the way Lear's have been opened so that they glimpse a great man, a man capable of huge deeds, a man of tremendous potential who has been destroyed by an implacable universe that hammered wedges into the fault lines of his character. Then they will feel that necessary pity, not just for a lost old man but for all that might have been, all the lost possibilities. Then, just as Lear sees the truth, and just as the audience see the truth of Lear, he dies.

Oh dear, I have rambled on more than somewhat and, alas, not on the subject I originally intended.  Those words I quoted struck another chord with me.  "And take upon's the mystery of things / As though we were God's spies."  I am still reading, slowly, Michael Frayn's superb book "The Human Touch".  In it he touches upon just about every 'mystery of things' you could imagine, plus a few more that you probably never knew existed.  He does it all, as I reported before, with the lightest of touches but with no loss of intellectual rigour.  Whilst gently sceptical concerning some of the more imaginative efforts to explain what is, frankly, unexplainable, he avoids any set dogma himself.  Perhaps a clue to his central theme is contained in the sub-title to his book: "Our part in the creation of the universe" [my emphasis].  I can't help feeling that we have entered a new renaissance.  Like our forefathers 400 hundred years ago we stand amazed but nervous, not so much that hitherto locked doors have been thrust open, but that there were even doors there in the first place! And then, as we slowly proceed to investigate the new rooms in this universal mansion we find, not more certainties, but more and greater mysteries. So, spy-like, we attempt to insinuate ourselves into the fabric of this state of being, and as we go, we become less and less sure of ourselves, humbled by the sheer colossal mystery of it all. But, God above, how lucky I am to be alive and to be aware, even in my tiny way, of the infinitely thrilling puzzle of it all.