Repetition: By next week we are advised to have a thesis statement for our papers, up on our blog or elsewhere. And of course, blogging about other people's great blogs(Sam and Nick's probably take the cake but my oh my the competition is stiff), and blogging about the connection between the Bhagavad Gita and Hamlet, in particular Act 5 which is so different from the four previous acts.

Because Hamlet has had a very dark epiphany in the first half of the play: that the world is corrupt and everything artificial, everyone acting a part(note the frequency of the words "play", "put-on", "act" and "perform"). This ties in interestingly with the Sanskrit(I think?) word maya--the world as illusion. But by Act 5 what has Hamlet realized? What epiphany has he had?

It may well have something to do with detachment, which Tayloring Taylor so cogently brought up. We've suggested, via the Gita and the Four Quartets, that this is seeing thing with an equal eye--the learned scholar and the dog and the man that eats the dog being the same thing. And it is also the stage wherein you move beyond praise and blame because praise and blame are the same thing. This is hard to grasp, I know. But then that's the point.