Spring Break, Clive, and Sigmund

I've nearly gotten to the bottom of my list of things I wanted to do over Spring Break. I love it when that happens. Although, my last two things aren't exactly fifteen-minute assignments that I'll be able to just check off my list:

• Read Hamlet
• Get some Rachel Corrie research done

I finished everything that's due next week--I even read back through Macbeth for next week in my Shakespeare class. I've had a really hard time actually re-reading plays for my Shakespeare class that I've already read (which is all of them except for Henry IV Part 1, The Tempest, and--yes--Hamlet.)

The Rachel Corrie research will be ongoing and really doesn't need to be started now, but I checked out all of these books and I'm just kind of excited to get started I guess. Or maybe just nuts. I also spent almost two hours going through the script, putting boxes around things I was clueless about, looking up Wikipedia articles about them, and sending the links to myself. This is going to take me hours. Well. Probably more like days. I'm such a geek. And I'm sure, as I trek through the research, many more hours than probably necessary will go into journaling (in my case, blogging) about it.

But! Before I get to all that, the third-to-last item on my To-Do-Over-Spring-Break list was "Read Freud's Last Session by Mark St. Germain." It's been on my "To Read" list for over a year and I've just never gotten the chance to actually sit down and read it (or, more accurately, I just kept putting it off--it's really a short script and a fast read). The play is a lively conversation between a young C.S. Lewis and an aged Sigmund Freud in his last days, dying of oral cancer. Anyway, I liked it (I knew I probably would), and if I get the chance to see it will most certainly do so. But, in the meantime, here are my favorite quotes and pieces from the script:

FREUD: I have spent my life in "institutions." Religious or secular, they are ruled by autocrats who insist their vision of reality is superior to all they command. I state the truth no matter who it outrages.

LEWIS: Do you enjoy it? Their outrage?

FREUD: I enjoy provoking discussion, such as ours.

LEWIS: The good man serves God as his loving son, the evil man serves God as his tool.

LEWIS: (Smiles.) Yes. We were discussing myths. I told Tolkien I enjoyed them artistically, but basically I regarded them as fiction, as lies, as you do. Tolkien stopped me. He said, "You're wrong. They're far from lies. They're man's way of expressing truths that would otherwise go unspoken.

LEWIS: And that's your choice, [Tolkien] told me: to believe or disbelieve.

LEWIS: ...Man is suffering for the fault of man.

FREUD: Is that your excuse for pain and suffering? Did I bring about my own cancer ? Or is killing me God's revenge? (Lewis, for the first time, is hesitant. This is an issue he will grapple with all his life.) 

LEWIS: I don't know.

FREUD: You don't know?

LEWIS: And I don't pretend to. It's the most difficult question of all, isn't it? If God is good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy. But we aren't. So God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.

FREUD: We are making progress.

LEWIS: I can't justify your pain. Yet I can't imagine God desires it.

FREUD: You like music.

LEWIS: Very much so.

FREUD: Sacred music, no doubt?

LEWIS: Actually, I hate hymns.

FREUD: Really?

LEWIS: They're like dipping a chocolate bar in sugar. Unbearably cloying. Hymns drive me out of church early every Sunday. I leave after communion and head across the street for a pint. There, I'm happy to listen to any music playing... My objection to church music is that it trivializes emotions I already feel.

LEWIS: My idea of God; it constantly changes. He shatters it, time and time again. Still, I feel the world is crowded with Him. He is everywhere. Incognito. And His incognito--it's so hard to penetrate. The real struggle is to keep trying. To come awake. Then stay awake.