Be thou a witch or a spirit, thou com'st
in such an enchanting form, that I will speak of thee. [1]
According to William Hazlitt, if there's one thing men hate it's to be bored. And evil - in small, chaotic doses at least - does bring a little danger and a touch of horror into the world, i.e., an element of excitement to counter the tedium of everyday life:
"How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other!" [2]
Notes
[1] I'm paraphrasing from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act 1, scene 4).
[2] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826.
I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 128, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment