If You Want to Be Good At Sex Read Shakespeare
(This one goes in the Red section)
A funny experience I once had was having to explain an animation of Hamlet to a 5-year old, as I sped-reviewed Hamlet before a screening of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which is based on Hamlet, and is funny.
She came to me and laid on the beanbag with me, and kept asking “what’s that?” “Why is that guy killing that guy?” as the animation sounds played in my headphones.
“He is trying to kill that guy because he killed that other guy’s dad before”
“Why”
“Because he wants revenge”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the feeling you get when somebody hurts somebody you care about, and you want to hurt them back.”
“Why did he kill that guy?”
“He killed that first guy by mistake”
“Why?”
“He thought the guy was this other guy”
“Why did he want to kill that guy?”
“He thought that guy killed his dad, and wanted revenge”
“Why is everybody killing everybody”
“They are angry and have a lot of emotions”
“Why”
“Because it’s the genre. It’s a tragedy. We are going to watch the comedy version later. That other movie will be the funny version of this”
“Explaining why things happened” in a tragedy was fascinating to me because there wasn’t a good reason for anything. There were a lot of strong emotions, and setups, and
Tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin, which is dealing with existentialism and death and all these wonderful things. And the same authors would write both, I think in part because it feels good to write both.
In a tragedy, the events are all aligned in such a way that the maximally most terrible thing happens, to everyone involved, whether they deserve it or not. They are mixed up in this cascade of events that nobody can stop or change in time, and then there is a terrible fate.
In a comedy, the events are ridiculous.
Genre writing is interesting because the audience knows what’s going to happen, in some way, for a tragedy, but they don’t know how it’s going to happen, and with comedy, sort of nothing happens, but what specifically happens is very important.
I think that being a good spouse to a partner means contending with tragedy, some of the time, and contending with it deeply enough to really lean into the comedy, when the comedy occurs to you, because you know the tragedy will hit later.
Being able to flip between them makes you a better dancer. Being a better dancer makes you a better lover.
If you are married to someone, you will at minimum contend with the death of your parents with each other, and probably a lot of other people too. There will be a lot of emotions as you go through life’s journey together, and the point of marriage is for these experiences to be better, not worse.
And so not freaking out every time something bad happens, and instead having a better thing happen would be a good idea.