What always stuck with me about Shylock’s soliloquy in Merchant of Venice is how he opens with some of the grandest language ever written on the commonality of all humankind, and then seamlessly descends into the basest hatreds (which are also, unfortunately, just as universal):
To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
David Remnick writes a (predictably) brilliant piece titled “The Moralist” on the Lewis-Tyson fight in this week’s New Yorker. With a group of invited reporters, the boxer was conducting “a vintage Tyson performance, full of contempt at his visitors and fury at the world”:
I’m just a dark guy from the den of iniquity. You guys would rather be with someone else who’s equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I come across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. He makes you want to come and listen to me.
You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can’t remember the last time I fucked a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and ho’s and bitches because you put that image on me…. I wish that you guys had children, so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain.
If only loathing, self-loathing, and rage were not quite so intrinsic to the human experience, the world might be a much nicer place.
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