Word: exist
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Students of Shakespeare know, or are supposed to, that the characters in his plays exist only while they are on the stage or the page. The rest, as far as they and we are concerned, is silence. Thus the eminent scholars and critics who once busied themselves in disputations about the number of Lady Macbeth's children or Hamlet's course of study at Wittenberg were actually engaged in nothing more than romantic woolgathering. But the urge to think of Shakespeare's people as real dies hard, and woolgathering has its charms, as John Updike wittily demonstrates anew in Gertrude...
Spawned by a mix of prosperity and politics, teenagers are a modern luxury good. The question for the new century is, How much longer will teenagers exist, at least in the form that James Dean made famous? Twenty years, tops, is my guess. Teenagers, as classically defined, are already dying out, or at least changing into something different. The buffer zone they once inhabited is being squeezed out of existence for two reasons: children are growing up faster than ever before, and adults are growing up more slowly...
...picture. Or sometimes I stage them right from their inception. I have a series of working styles, but I don't adhere to any one fully. But they are completely constructed-even if I happen on a place, I'm still creating a fiction. The work really does exist somewhere between autobiography and fiction. They are places that I know, people that I know. Yet, these aren't moments that are real. This is a friend who's struggling with HIV, but he doesn't go into rest areas like that. They're kind of fantastic in their illustration...
...when we are in an "audience" state, we can't really say that we exist. Everyone knows Descartes' famous axiom "I think, therefore I am," but Sartre came closer to the mark when he argued that to exist is to be perceived. To be invisible is to be dead. Thus, being part of an audience is a state entirely different than any other state during our lives...
...everyday lives. The darkness of a theater may allow us to feel compassion for a Trigorin or a Don on stage, but when daylight returns and we meet similar people in our lives we revert back to judgment and condemnation. We have to. We are no longer unobservable. We exist, and so long as we choose to exist we have to defend that existence. Judgment and condemnation are means of self-defense...