Prospero's Books: The universe of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz

About this blog

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, is ousted by his brother and exiled to an island. With the help of a friend, Prospero manages to take with him his beloved library.

Prospero, like his creator, lived in a time when boundaries between disciplines were not as rigid as they are today. Prospero's books would have dealt with the cosmos—spiritual and material, inner and outer—as a whole.

In this blog, I try to do the same. I'm not Prospero, just a student rummaging through his library and writing in the margins. Prospero's Books is a blog about seeing the world as a whole, by looking at
- signs, especially the relationships between signifiers and what they signify
- stories, especially big-picture stories, such as myths and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce
- systems, especially complex, nonlinear systems
- spirit, especially as understood by the Christian and Western esoteric traditions
Welcome! Please join the conversation.

—Kenneth W. Davis

(Note: Although I admire Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, this blog is not directly about that film. )

Who, and Some of What, I Am

09 April 2006

The universe of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz

Last night's excellent performance of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival * reminded me that the play is one of the twentieth century's most poignant treatments of the human effort to find meaning in a universe seen as meaningless.

In The View from the Center of the Universe (see What I've Been Reading) Primack and Abrams write:

Perhaps the existentialists saw the universe as inherently meaningless because they understood it so poorly. . . . Existential terror is a response to a universe seen as infinite or at least incomprehensibly large, almost empty, and with no apparent purpose, so that to avoid total absurdity individuals must create meaning for themselves. This response has permated our culture so thoroughly that many people assume that the existential stance is scientifically justified. But its fundamental assumption that the universe has no higher level of organization is wrong scientifically and an aberration historically (82-83).

*In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the proud papa of the BSF's development director. And I've been a fan of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern since I saw its first New York run in 1967-68.

Posted by Kenneth W. Davis in Books, Cosmos, Shakespeare, Spirit, Stories, Systems | Permalink

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What I've been reading

Frank Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
A clearly and wittily written exposition, by a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, of the new ether, which Wilczek calls the "Grid," lying beneath all matter.
Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan: CosMos: A Co-creator's Guide to the Whole World
Laszlo's latest, a fascinating survey of new science but a bit too New-Age for my taste.
Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
An argument, by a leading complexity theorist, against both reductionism in science and fundamentalism in religion, and for "a new understanding of a natural divinity based on an emerging, scientifically based world view."
Harriett Hawkins: Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory
A powerful, fascinating book on the relationships between systems and stories. By page 75 I've already filled two pages with "marginal" notes.
Mary Swander: The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
A fellow Iowan's gorgeously written account of her search for healing in the American Southwest.
Michael Frayn: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe
The playwright and novelist on the role of human beings in the cosmos.
Philip Davis: Shakespeare Thinking
A fascinating new look at Shakespeare's language, focusing on "the almost physical effect Shakespeare has upon mind at its most primary level of excited existence."
Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon: The Templar Code For Dummies
A comprehensive, highly readable survey of the Knights Templar in history and myth.
Desmond Graham: After Shakespeare
Contemporary incarnations of Shakespeare's characters in a series of terse, gritty, lovely poems.
Paul Davies: Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life
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David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Though labeled as "Business," a philosophical look at the history of classifying things, and the ways classification is being changed by information technology.
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
A scientist's passionate effort to demonstrate "why there almost certainly is no God," fundamentally flawed by the author's insistence on defining religious language simplistically.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh: The Elixir and the Stone: The Tradition of Magic and Alchemy
From the Holy Blood and Holy Grail authors, a fairly objective (so far; I'm 100 pages in) history of Hermeticism.
Leonard Smith: Chaos: A Very Short Introduction
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William Dietrich: Napoleon's Pyramids
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Rainer Maria Rilke: Rilke's Book of Hours
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy's beautiful translation of one of my favorite books of poems.
Christopher Hodapp: Solomon's Builders: Freemasons, Founding Fathers and the Secrets of Washington D.C.
A witty and well-researched survey by my friend and lodge brother Chris Hodapp.
Colin McGinn: Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays
A philosopher's fascinating and clearly written review of six plays: Dream, the four great tragedies, and the Tempest.
Jeff Hoke: The Museum of Lost Wonder
A truly wonderful graphic book about life, the universe, and everything. Includes cut-out models. The Prospero's Books Book of the Year for 2006.
John Gross, ed.: After Shakespeare: An Anthology
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Geoff Ward: Spirals: The Pattern of Existence
A survey of the spiral and its three-dimensional cousin, the helix, in art, ritual, life, the universe, and everything.
John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett: The Hero's Journey: How Educators Can Transform Schools and Improve Learning
A call to educational reform, using the metaphor of Campbell's "monomyth."
Frances A. Yates: The Art of Memory
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Jill Line: Shakespeare and the Fire of Love
A study of Shakespeare's plays as reflections of Christian Platonism.
James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science
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Harold J. Morowitz: The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex
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Daniel Chanan Matt: The Essential Kabbalah
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Matthew Pearl: The Poe Shadow
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Steve Berry: The Templar Legacy: A Novel
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Martin Lings: Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things
An esoteric reading of Shakespeare's middle and late plays.
The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty, and Power of Fractals
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Kurt Brown, editor: Verse & Universe
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John Allen Paulos: Once Upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories
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Fred Adams: Origins of Existence: How Life Emerged in the Universe
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Rowan Williams: Writing in the Dust: After September 11
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Bernard Haisch: The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All
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Sandy Eisenberg Sasso: Naamah, Noah's Wife
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Dava Sobel: The Planets
An entertaining history of humanity's relationship with the Solar System, "through the lens of popular culture."
Anthony Stevens: Jung: A Very Short Introduction
A highly readable introduction, part of a series I've found excellent before.
Kim Zetter: Simple Kabbalah
The best short introduction of several I've read, especially in this unabridged reading by Theodore Bikel.
Stephen Trimble: The People: Indians of the American Southwest
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Richard Smoley: Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy
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Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams: The View from the Center of the Universe : Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos
An astonishing effort to use myth and symbol to convey the state of current knowledge of the universe and humanity's "central" place in it.
Ervin Laszlo: Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos : The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality
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Stephen Greenblatt: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
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