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Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of
the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world, who carries the pain of the
world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain
measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to
meet it in joy, instead of self-pity. The secret: offer your heart as a vehicle to transform
cosmic suffering into joy.
--Sufi saying
PLA YWRIGHTS
People who know [British playwright David] Hare well say that the key thing about him, the
thing easily overlooked beneath his articulate, assured exterior, is that he is a hopeless
romantic. He doesn't disagree.
"I think that people can change each other, and that the search for fulfillment
through love is a wonderful thing, " he says. "There's a generation of writers, like Stoppard
and Pinter, who were profoundly influenced by Beckett and his existential horror at the idea
that we're alone in the world. Now along comes the next generation of writers who aren't, as
it were, Beckett-influenced. To us the real world is real. We actually believe in things like
social justice and romantic love, that you can improve each other's lives and individuals can
help each other and that society can organize in a way in which life can get better, and that
people can be fulfilled through each other.
"Under the eye of eternity -- the austere and cold eye with which Beckett looks at the
world -- it's true that the story always ends the same way: we all die, and we may well turn
out to be meaningless. " Hare flashes an electric grin and looks anything but depressed about
his, and everyone else's potential meaninglessness. "I hate looking at the world that way. All
my temperamental bias has been away from that view. I believe that the struggle is
worthwhile."
--Sarah Lyall, "And Another Thing from David Hare," New York Times Magazine
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