Word: macbeths
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...curriculum of our public high schools. I do so for the same reason I support teaching English, keyboarding and the U.S. Constitution: each is useful knowledge for informed citizens in a democracy. My only caution: teach all of the Bible. We wouldn't sample bits and pieces of Macbeth, Jane Eyre, 1984 or Catch-22 in a literature class; we would expect students to read an entire work. Just so with the Bible. My enthusiasm for this proposal is not entirely selfless. I subscribe to the position espoused by the great Isaac Asimov: "Properly read, the Bible is the most...
...battle. I'm suggesting a much lower standard: just not dying badly. At a minimum, not dying comically-death by banana peel or pratfall or (my favorite, I confess) onstage, like the actor Harold Norman, killed in 1947 during an especially energetic sword fight in the last scene of Macbeth...
...Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsy (to name but a few), the committed friend valorized by Montaigne, the citizen of the Kingdom of Ends described by Kant, the free spirit praised by Nietzsche, and so on. A similarly lengthy list could be compiled of those figures—from Lucifer to Macbeth, from Ivan Karamazov to Citizen Kane—who have suffered the consequences of living what was considered by their most eloquent interpreters to be the opposite of a good life. A careful reading of cases like these will show that, pace Tolstoy and the traditional model that he assumed...
...Swallowtail's elegant tearoom. As I move to sit at our table, a second butler, named Mikami, materializes to ease me into my chair. "Good day, princess," he says to my dining companion--and not, I assume, to me. I order the Earl Grey tea and the Macbeth--a petite ham-and-cheese panini, the preferred snack of bloody-minded Scottish tyrants. Mikami leaves to prepare the tea but not before showing us a golden bell we can use to summon him. We hunger. We ring. He runs. Six seconds. Jeeves would be proud...
...could get used to having a footman on call. Not long after I finished my Macbeth (is this a cream scone I see before me?), Saionji appears. "Mademoiselle, your coach awaits," he says to my dining companion--the signal that our 80 minutes are up. We step through the open door and flag down our coach on the Tokyo street...