NOTICINGS: On seeing Hamnet

To be or not to be a citizen.

When the question speaks. Painting, Lisa Citron

Last night I saw the film Hamnet. When Agnes howls at Hamnet’s last breath, I wept. I held my daughter to her last breath. To my surprise, when Hamlet calls out “outrageous fortune,” I wept. As I drove home, something else caught me by surprise: To vote or not to vote? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune— prices rising, words hardening, neighbors disappearing.

“The slings and arrows.”

“The sea of troubles.”

“The self-evident truths.”

To be or not to be a citizen.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights—

not self-evident then,
not unalienable without doing,
not truths at all unless someone acts as if they were.

“It’s too late,” they say.
“It’s too small,” they say.
And Folly, almost weeping, answers:
It was only ever meant to be done.

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