"What would you do if you were me?" Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you… — Robertson Davies
"What would you do if you were me?" Cobbler pondered for a moment. "Well," he said, "I suppose if I were you -- that's to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate -- I'd go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over."
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People who talk a lot about their troubles never commit suicide; talk's the greatest safety-valve there is. I always laugh at that bit in Hamlet where he pretends to despise himself because he unpacks his heart with words, and falls a-scolding like a very drab; that's why the soliloquy about suicide is just Hamlet putting on intellectual airs. A chatterbox like that would never pop himself off with a bare bodkin. No, the suicides are the quiet ones, who can't find the words to fit their misery.
Pretence is wonderfully stimulating to the artistic mind, which is why some people lie for fun, rather than from necessity.
But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory - humorous, poignant, humane allegory - disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.
