6 - Creating Raisons d’etre

Summary

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

A Vain, Fruitless, and Self-Contradictory Effort

In this famous soliloquy from Act 3 Scene 1, Shakespeare's Hamlet clearly didn't think his existence amounted to anything worthwhile, bombarded as it was with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with heartache and a thousand natural shocks, with the whips and scorns of time, with the oppressor's wrong and the pangs of disprized love. Why should he continue with the grunt and sweat of his weary life?

We have seen this question raised many times before in this book, whether in the lamentations of the Man to his Ba, in the terminal boredom of David Foster Wallace, in the existential distress of Anna Karenina and Constantin Levin or in the spiritual weariness of Gerard Manley Hopkins.