My friend complains about this summer day. Too hot, too still. She says, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to like any of this.” I tell her, “Then don’t. But let me be here while you hate it.” We sit on the steps, and I recite, half-laughing, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” The line lingers. Shakespeare’s summer was eternal; this one rather insufferable. But something shifts as we begin to talk about him—the ghost of a man who still lives in books and classrooms.
A professor once said that Shakespeare took the roots of all we feel, like envy, fear, and love beyond happiness and that is why he still feels relevant. He crossed the bridge of time and knew us deeply the way he understood the anatomy of emotions and bending words to fit this musing right. Musings that even if in his world took place in fantasy spaces, splurge and spill out of today’s small bits of life too, so much so that when I- tell my sister love is not for the faint-hearted or later say, “Good riddance,” after her heartbreak, I’m quoting him without realizing it. Shakespeare gave us the words for joy, grief, and all that lies between which is why his plays weren’t meant to be read; they were meant to be felt by being spoken about. Every word, every silence, every goosebump.
It’s been 461 years since his birth on April 23, 1564. Still, he endures, because he wrote what we couldn’t say. He asked, “To be or not to be,” and left us an answer in his legacy which is to say, to in a way, always be.
-Urvi Patil
