Aging with Lear

By my best estimate, I’ve read King Lear six or seven times. I read it for the first time in my early twenties, before I married and had children, and my assessment of Lear at that time in my life was that of a young man who hadn’t been forced to look hard at himself and his weaknesses. I didn’t see what Lear and I had in common, though with my latest reading, certain uncomfortable aspects of Lear’s personality resonated in a way that they didn’t twenty-plus years ago.

In my first reading of King Lear, I took Lear’s defense of himself at face value. Lear exclaims in the middle of the play, “I am a man / more sinned against than sinning.” (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 59-60). By this point in the play, Lear’s two older daughters, despite their proclamations of love in the first scene, have shown their teeth, and have driven their father and his handful of followers out into a storm with no shelter. Lear’s famous line from the middle of the storm sounds defensive. He’s willing to admit on some level that he has sinned, but his failings are not as great as the failings of others.

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Tolstoy, Beethoven, and Why I Write about What I Read

I think I’ve read Tolstoy's “The Kreutzer Sonata” before, but I have only the vaguest memory of the arc of the story. In fact, I’m about halfway through a second reading, and I’m amazed and ashamed at how little it resonates with me at all. I’ve been at it for a few days, and still haven’t gotten to the part of the story that I would have described a week ago if I’d been called upon to describe the story. A week ago, I would have summarized the story by saying that a married man gets jealous when his wife plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata (a piece for violin and piano) with someone else, and that the man’s jealousy is unfounded.