Today we’ll put side by side two meditations on death and
what lies beyond:
- Shakespeare’s
King Lear in the storm, wrestling with fate and nature.
- Plato’s
Phaedo, where Socrates calmly discusses the soul’s immortality
before drinking the hemlock.
Day 3 – Shakespeare & Plato
Shakespeare: King Lear, Act III, Scene 2
Lear cries to the storm
Context:
Lear, cast out by his daughters, wanders into a raging storm on the heath.
Stripped of dignity, power, and home, he calls upon the heavens. This is
Shakespeare at his most elemental: man as bare life in the teeth of nature.
Extract (~40 lines):
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:—
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ’tis foul!
Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes,
Unwhipt of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjur’d, and thou simular man of virtue
That art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practis’d on man’s life: close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinn’d against than sinning.
Reflection prompts:
- Copy
the phrase “More sinn’d against than sinning.” Does it still
resonate in modern moral struggles?
- Read
aloud with rising storm-like intensity. Notice how the language itself
mimics thunder, lightning, and rain.
- Hamlet
asked about the afterlife; Macbeth saw a dagger of the mind; Lear now
rages against the very elements. How do these stages of Shakespearean
despair differ?
Plato: Phaedo
Socrates on philosophy as preparation for death
Context:
The Phaedo recounts the last hours of Socrates. Surrounded by his
friends, he argues that philosophy is, at its core, a practice for dying:
separating the soul from the distractions of the body. He assures his
companions that death is not to be feared if the soul is immortal.
Extract (~3–4 paragraphs, Jowett translation, public
domain):
“Let us reflect in this way:—if we have hopes of arriving
whither, when dead, we go, where the wise are gathered, then how great is the
gain of departing this life! For surely, my friends, if any one arrives in
Hades released from folly and fear, and from loves of many kinds, and from all
other human ills, and brings with him the soul purified, he departs to dwell
with the gods. Is not this release the greatest blessing? And is not the
practice of philosophy the purification itself?
“For the true philosophers are always occupied in the
practice of dying, wherefore also to them death is least of all terrible. Look
at the matter in this way:—would not they be greatly ridiculous, who are eager
to have the company of the gods, and to hope that after death they shall attain
the things for which they have long been preparing, and yet are troubled when
the hour of death arrives? Surely they would be most absurd.
“Surely, then, if we have been all our lives in training for
this very thing, the hour of death ought not to disturb us. You may think of
me, if you like, as not only now but always a man who is eager to be among
those who dwell in wisdom. For I am confident that nothing else makes the soul
pure but wisdom itself. And when it has been thus purified, it is prepared and
ready to depart to the place of the divine, invisible, immortal, and wise, and
to be happy in the company of gods.
“Wherefore, Simmias and Cebes, if you and I were altogether
unprepared for the hour of death, it would be truly ridiculous for us, who have
spent our whole lives in the pursuit of philosophy, to be troubled at leaving
life behind. For we are confident in one thing—that the soul is immortal, and
that when separated from the body she goes away to the like, the invisible, the
divine, immortal, and wise; whither, if God will, my soul also is soon to go.”
Reflection prompts:
- Copy
the line “The true philosophers are always occupied in the practice of
dying.”
- Compare
with Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” — both ask: what lies after death?
Where Hamlet trembles, Socrates calmly welcomes.
- What
would it mean in practice to “prepare for death” without morbidity, as a
daily act of clarity?
✨ Today’s resonance:
Lear shakes his fist at the storm, demanding the world reveal its hidden guilt.
Socrates, in calm voice, welcomes death as the soul’s release. Rage and
serenity, storm and stillness — two ends of the human arc.
In above lear speech, the last few lines, what do they refer
to? To Gods?
ChatGPT said:
Yes — those last lines of Lear’s storm speech reach upward,
but in a very particular way. Let’s look closely:
“Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes,
Unwhipt of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjur’d, and thou simular man of virtue
That art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practis’d on man’s life: close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinn’d against than sinning.”
What Lear is invoking
- “The
great gods” → the divine powers who oversee the storm. He interprets
the thunder and lightning as their “summons” to expose hidden guilt.
- “Find
out their enemies now” → Lear imagines the storm as divine justice in
action, unmasking those whose crimes are concealed.
- “Undivulged
crimes… perjur’d… incestuous…” → he lists the types of sinners who
might be hiding among mankind — the guilty whose wrongs have escaped
punishment.
- “Close
pent-up guilts, rive your concealing continents” → he calls for hidden
crimes to burst forth into the open under the pressure of the storm.
And then Lear’s turn inward
After raging that the storm should scourge the wicked, he
suddenly turns back to himself:
- “I
am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning.”
This is both complaint and self-justification. Lear sees himself not as one of those hidden sinners but as a victim of injustice — cast out by his daughters, abused by fate.
Why this matters in the play
- On
one level: Lear is projecting outward. The storm becomes a cosmic
trial — the gods as judges, lightning as executioners.
- On
another level: Lear is baring his own wounded pride. He feels wronged,
but Shakespeare has made us aware of Lear’s own earlier blindness and
rashness. The line “more sinn’d against than sinning” is poignant,
but also debatable — it mixes truth with self-pity.
- For
the audience: it’s ambiguous. Are the gods listening? Or is this an
old man shouting into indifferent weather?
✨ In short: Lear’s last lines in
this speech appeal to the gods as instruments of justice, demanding that
the storm drag out the hidden crimes of men. Yet, even as he speaks of others’
guilt, he insists on his own innocence, wrapping himself in the role of victim.
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