Slow to recover after my recent medical emergency, I have spent several days on my back pondering what life is for. Is it for doing more of what I have already done, or should I change profession to something useful? Does the same thought ever occur to, say, Bruce Willis? As he changes his vest for the next scene in A Good Day to Die Hard Again or Die Hard With Pursed Lips, is he wondering whether it is too late to train as a doctor? At which point I, having been trained as a journalist, check up to make sure that he was not trained as a doctor. If he was, I would need to change the previous sentence to have him wondering about whether it was too late to train as a fireman.
Restlessly I remember The Towering Inferno, in which Steve McQueen played a fireman: presumably from choice, possibly out of the exhausted artist’s deep longing to do something useful. After decades as a superstar getting the girl, suddenly he was up there looking deeply concerned about fire-resistant materials. I mean of course, the previous Steve McQueen, not the current Steve McQueen. My mind is wandering.
Among writers, not even Shakespeare, were he to come back from the dead, would find it easy to claim that he was more useful than a good nurse. I have been reading The Comedy Of Errors and wondering how he would cope if he attended a rehearsal of Act I Scene I and found out that the star actor playing the Duke did not realise that in the line “His goods confiscate to the duke’s dispose” the word “confiscate” has to be stressed on the second syllable or the line will not be a pentameter. Would Shakespeare audibly wonder if it were too late to start training as a garbage collector?
Though still daunted by how much effort I have to put into translating Shakespeare’s English into modern English, it’s not as depressing as having to put so much effort into translating modern English into English. The BBC News online has become such a rich source of sentences written in the wrong order that I no longer bother to note them down, so this next one is an outdated example. “Jeremy Clarkson has apologised to the Top Gear producer he punched after settling a £100,000 racial discrimination and injury claim.” You can see what’s wrong with that sentence. But what I’m really afraid of is that the time must soon come when you won’t see what’s wrong with that sentence, because there will be nobody left alive who could give a curse about how a sentence fits together. Time to start training as an actor. Watch out for me in Drop Dead Hard Forever.
