The End of an (non) Era

I have a certain degree of affection for Hamlet. I am not so sure that I can completely identify with him, though certainly I fantasize that I can. Perhaps it is merely the idealized romance of the man. I once spoke to a friend, comparing a love that I desired to Romeo and Juliette ... my friend quickly retorted "They, (Romeo and Juliette) are both dead." Indeed, the story does not end well for the mad Dane either.

We go through life acquiring dreams and desires. We work on them, daring in hope that we can have what it is we desire ... some are achieved and are what we thought they would be, most however are not. Some fade with time, others, when we arrive at the destination of them, turn out to be bright, but vacant of anything real, like jewelry made of paste. Most dreams are broken by the realities of life ... crushed like grapes under the winemakers foot, some perhaps, age well enough to be called fine wine, but most leave us with the bitter taste of vinegar in our mouths.

Should we then cease to dream? What is a man with none? He is nothing, a corpse waiting to be. A shell of life, sucked dry by the dessicated world, withered, waiting to be forgotten. He has ceased to be human, a condition we dare not find ourselves in. So we smile at the rain, we persevere when we should lay down and die, and yes, we stay our own hand from deciding our own end ...

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.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene I

... for hopes sake, for a new dream upon the death of the old.