Shakespeare
for Rosh Hashanah
From “Walter Benjamin,
1892-1940,”
by Hannah Arendt
(Introduction to
Benjamin’s Illuminations.):
THE PEARL DIVER
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
— THE TEMPEST, I, 2
“… we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.
And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past– but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living– as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”
For examples of everlasting Urphänomene, see Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah and The Square Wheel; recall that on this date
“In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived German Jews of their citizenship and made the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany.”
— Today in History, the Miami Herald
(For some further reflections on square wheels, see Triumph of the Cross.)