The Shakespeare Conundrum.

The thought occasionally occurs to me that the practice of referring to dead people in the present tense is irrational. We say ‘Shakespeare is dead.’ How can Shakespeare be dead? How can Shakespeare be anything since he no longer exists? I suppose it serves the cause of linguistic brevity, since the more rational form of expression – ‘Shakespeare no longer exists. He died.’ – is unnecessarily cumbersome. But then I thought of another explanation.

It’s often said (even by scientists) that time is an illusion. If that is the case, maybe we should see existence not in the form of a linear flow – past, present and future – but as something more akin to a vinyl record, on which all of the music exists simultaneously but we experience it as the stylus does. It would then follow that Shakespeare does still exist, but not in this part of the groove. He’s over there in a different part of the same continuous groove, and that's what being dead in the present tense means.

OK, so now I’m philosophising, and it seems to me that philosophy is nothing more than theorising and speculating and offering opinions on the unknowable. So having come up with a possible explanation for an apparent linguistic absurdity, maybe we should move on to an even bigger question: why do we bother with philosophers?

 

And now I'm going to watch some more of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. So far, it's dead good (as one example of common English vernacular would have it.)