“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
Guildenstern: In the morning, the sun would be easterly. I think we can assume that.
Rosencrantz: That it's morning?
Guildenstern: If it is, and the sun is over there for instance, that would be northerly. On the other hand, if it's not morning and the sun is over there, that would still be northerly. To put it another way, if we came from down there, and it's morning, the sun would be up there, but if it's actually over there and it's still morning, we must have come from back there, and if that's southerly, and the sun is really over there, then it's the afternoon. However, if none of these are the case...
Rosencrantz: Why don't you go and have a look?
Guildenstern: Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer
R and G are dead is a true gem of the English language. Strongly recommend the film!
I'll never forget the first time I heard his name. As a kid, I had seen the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun starring a young Christian Bale and considered it one of my favorites. When I was an adult eagerly showing it to friends, one of them who was a theater major loudly exclaimed during the opening credits, "Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay?!" I knew most of the names in the opening credits but had no idea who Tom Stoppard was until that moment.
When he passed away a couple days ago, I was surprised to discover he was originally from a Moravian town I've been to since one of my ancestors grew up 10 miles farther down the road. The twists and turns his family took escaping from there to the other side of the world and back no doubt enhanced his keen insight into people.
The Player giving a bit of meta-commentary (meta-meta-commentary?) on plays in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:
"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
I wish National Theatre would re-release the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead productions with Cumberbatch and Radcliffe in memoriam, either on NTatHome or in theatres...
During the offseason the players in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival did Hamlet one month and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead the next with all the same actors playing the same roles.
While I get you're trying to highlight jkr's anti-trans opinion, both can be true. You can be an asshole, while also being subject to other assholes behavior.
I read all of her tweets but I don't know of any anti-trans statements by Rowling. I'd appreciate it if you could point one out.
I haven't heard her say that there's anything wrong with being trans, that it's an illness, or that there should be any consequences. I have heard her decry the excesses of some trans activists and allies, particularly in her defense of women-only spaces. That seems to me to be a poor fit for "asshole".
This is something she wrote on Twitter... JK Rowling wrote, "There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that ends up wrecking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined."
I mean it’s pretty straightforward - due to trauma over her past experiences with sexual assault at the hands of cis men, she now sees trans women as a facade used by predatory cis men to sexually assault cis women in bathrooms and locker rooms and other segregated spaces.
To her, trans women are really cis men pretending to be women, to make it easier to rape them. There’s kind of no nice way of saying it.
It’s textbook transphobia / queer bashing. Fear of sexual assault at the hands of queer people is probably one of the most basic reasons to justify this particular brand of bigotry. “I don’t hate queers, I’m just concerned for the safety of -“ take your pick - women, children, sometimes even men. For JK it’s women.
The alternatives - that "man" and "woman" are identities that anyone of either sex can claim, or that "man" and "woman" are defined by a narrow set of cultural stereotypes - are very niche definitions that should be disregarded as, respectively, absurd and sexist.
Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
I wrote an extended essay on “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in high school… 1998-1999 period. I loved his screenplays even though I’m not a great fan of theatre in general. 88 is a ripe old age but it’s still deeply saddening.
You're not losing much; the film is really good, and features Oldman... among other very good acting. There is elitist cohort bent on signaling how they cannot stand films, and how live theater is superior, blah blah. Well, usually the films are vastly superior to productions, in both interpretation of the script, and complexity of execution. The film starring Oldman is an instance of that, I think. But it's all secondary to reading the text itself.
R&G is a nice play, but honestly it doesn't come off the page nicely. The same is true for late-Beckett. I'm a huge fan of these guys, but I never understood the obsession literary teachers have with only a handful of plays, like R&G, or Waiting for Godot. These are very specific, nerd-like, I would even go as far as calling superficial—pieces of art. At any rate, Stoppard is best appreciated when read off the page, or on radio.. he's just one of these guys. Indian Ink is really good.
Wrote a paper on "Shakespeare in Love" (and the original Shakespeare) for lit in highschool.
My paper wasn't any good. Really in retrospect or at the time.
How he had reinvented it, reinvigorated it. (TIL about banished Rama and Sita from the Bhagavad Gita.) But then I realized it would just be easier to be a critic.
Anyways, truly when I lucked into big time screenwriting gigs it was in part because of the time I had spent writing a paper about Tom Stoppard's work.
I also remember watching "Finding Forrester" a lot. Punch the keys!
See now while I love this play I don't find that exchange notable. It's very plain, no? The implication is that one thought the other was going to say something but he wasn't. This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.
The alternative reading, where an entire exchange cleverly takes place without any substance, seems almost mistaken to me? In context it seems very clear it's "I thought you...[were going to say something.]" "No." "Ah."
No I think you are missing that what's funny about this exchange
It starts off with G thinking R has said something, but G is wrong - R didn't say anything. It ends up with G telling R he hadn't said anything, but again G is wrong, G started the whole thing off when he says Hm?
This is funny because R ends up thinking he'd imagined G saying something when infact the opposite happened.
It fits the characters well with G frequently being clever with no common sense and R having common sense but not being terribly smart.
This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.
One reason that it is funny is that it plays against that.
We the audience maybe forget for a moment that we are not watching real life. We are watching a drama or entertainment. So we expect something relevant to happen. That’s the convention.
The exchange plays with that expectation. It deliberately forces us out of our pleasant illusion and makes think us about our real experience - we are sitting in a seat and watching a performance, which is happening at that moment.
Yes, it's plain, banal, and even shallow; almost devoid of meaning. And there's genius in that. Who intentionally puts that in a play, without purpose?
i don-t think so. the stage direction before that dialogue is:
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first.)
if the dialogue should be clearly about who speaks first, wouldn-t the stage direction have been something like:
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first. ROS tries to say something but does not) ?
i mean - you could play it like that. But then to me some of the beauty of that dialogue is lost, that comes from the fact that for the spectator it-s not clear what is the subject of it.
Agreed. Or at least the best non-Shakespeare play I've ever read, and among the best works of 20th century literature. I really can't recommend Arcadia highly enough. It's both deeply moving and extremely thought-provoking, clever, and intellectual interesting.
They absolutely did, and German science never recovered its former dominant position after Hitler.
People don't even realize that as late as 100 years ago, Americans would travel to Germany for first-class university education. Harvard was good for networking and decent for overall education, but top notch science was done in places like Heidelberg.
Its still the case today, its just that America has gotten louder about its academic accomplishments being a key factor in economic success.
Your average German/Austrian universities have plenty of ex-pat Americans, there for precisely the fact that the education systems have such variety between the two nations. They are understated and under-represented in mainstream culture about academia, but for sure there are still Americans making the pilgrimage to older universities, for the diversity and strengths they offer.
America buys a lot of people in for its universities today, although of course there are bright Americans. German universities today are stricter and more rigorous in general than American ones.
I think the USA, like the UK, does tend to use name recognition. Oxford and Cambridge use interviews to filter out people, but are disproportionately represented in power structures.
While I agree with you that Germany doesn't have the intellectual prowess it once may have had, I don't think you can consider the Nobel prize a valid metric, personally. The Nobel prize has subverted itself many times over.
While German academia was rebuilding itself, American academia was chasing clout - one side effect being that the Nobel prize is more of a carnival attraction than an academic accomplishment.
My favourite quote from him:
“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
As a father of three amazing kiddos, what a wonderful sentiment stated so lucidly.
Thank you for sharing that quote.
Rosencrantz: Is that southerly?
Guildenstern: We came from roughly south.
Rosencrantz: Which way is that?
Guildenstern: In the morning, the sun would be easterly. I think we can assume that.
Rosencrantz: That it's morning?
Guildenstern: If it is, and the sun is over there for instance, that would be northerly. On the other hand, if it's not morning and the sun is over there, that would still be northerly. To put it another way, if we came from down there, and it's morning, the sun would be up there, but if it's actually over there and it's still morning, we must have come from back there, and if that's southerly, and the sun is really over there, then it's the afternoon. However, if none of these are the case...
Rosencrantz: Why don't you go and have a look?
Guildenstern: Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer
R and G are dead is a true gem of the English language. Strongly recommend the film!
The breakout roles for two phenomenal actors.
Roth was the first of the two that I noticed excelling in later projects, but he's only a really great actor.
I can't recall another role where Oldman played clown to a straightman character, but he dissolves into every role so completely...
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is "not." Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
I'll never forget the first time I heard his name. As a kid, I had seen the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun starring a young Christian Bale and considered it one of my favorites. When I was an adult eagerly showing it to friends, one of them who was a theater major loudly exclaimed during the opening credits, "Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay?!" I knew most of the names in the opening credits but had no idea who Tom Stoppard was until that moment.
When he passed away a couple days ago, I was surprised to discover he was originally from a Moravian town I've been to since one of my ancestors grew up 10 miles farther down the road. The twists and turns his family took escaping from there to the other side of the world and back no doubt enhanced his keen insight into people.
The Player giving a bit of meta-commentary (meta-meta-commentary?) on plays in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:
"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
One of his less famous works is a audio play based heavily on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. A recommended listen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkside_(radio_play)
Wow two things I love and had no idea had a love child. It can't possibly work?
A fun side effect story https://bsky.app/profile/neilpollyticks.bsky.social/post/3m6...
Tom Stoppard famously described Edinburgh as the "Reykjavik of the South" as a gibe about its claim to be the "Athens of the North".
I wish National Theatre would re-release the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead productions with Cumberbatch and Radcliffe in memoriam, either on NTatHome or in theatres...
During the offseason the players in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival did Hamlet one month and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead the next with all the same actors playing the same roles.
Sad day.
"She has been subjected to an onslaught of abuse that highlights an insidious authoritarian and misogynistic trend." -- Tom Stoppard on J.K. Rowling
While I get you're trying to highlight jkr's anti-trans opinion, both can be true. You can be an asshole, while also being subject to other assholes behavior.
I read all of her tweets but I don't know of any anti-trans statements by Rowling. I'd appreciate it if you could point one out.
I haven't heard her say that there's anything wrong with being trans, that it's an illness, or that there should be any consequences. I have heard her decry the excesses of some trans activists and allies, particularly in her defense of women-only spaces. That seems to me to be a poor fit for "asshole".
This is something she wrote on Twitter... JK Rowling wrote, "There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that ends up wrecking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined."
An eloquently worded rejection of a nonsensical and harmful ideology.
I hope one day you get the courage to say your real opinions on your main account. It must be hard living in fear of being banned from hackernews.
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You live a hard life my friend
She deals exclusively in dogwhistles.
Using a dogwhistle instead of more well-known hate speech does not mean a person is innocent of bigotry - quite the opposite.
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Just because you agree with them doesn't make them not anti-trans - it just means you agree with anti-trans things.
I mean it’s pretty straightforward - due to trauma over her past experiences with sexual assault at the hands of cis men, she now sees trans women as a facade used by predatory cis men to sexually assault cis women in bathrooms and locker rooms and other segregated spaces.
To her, trans women are really cis men pretending to be women, to make it easier to rape them. There’s kind of no nice way of saying it.
It’s textbook transphobia / queer bashing. Fear of sexual assault at the hands of queer people is probably one of the most basic reasons to justify this particular brand of bigotry. “I don’t hate queers, I’m just concerned for the safety of -“ take your pick - women, children, sometimes even men. For JK it’s women.
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Who gets to decide whether they are men or not? Is it you?
Why should you know better than them?
It's because they are male, obviously.
"Man" is the word we use to describe an adult person who is male.
"We" is an assumed group of people who agree with you.
The alternatives - that "man" and "woman" are identities that anyone of either sex can claim, or that "man" and "woman" are defined by a narrow set of cultural stereotypes - are very niche definitions that should be disregarded as, respectively, absurd and sexist.
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Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
Every nerd should read or see Arcadia. It is, perhaps, the finest work of modern theater. And it's heavy on math. The lead is based on Ada Lovelace.
I wrote an extended essay on “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in high school… 1998-1999 period. I loved his screenplays even though I’m not a great fan of theatre in general. 88 is a ripe old age but it’s still deeply saddening.
> “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead”
I love that movie. Never got to see it on stage though, which I've read was superior.
Well, Stoppard himself directed the movie.
You're not losing much; the film is really good, and features Oldman... among other very good acting. There is elitist cohort bent on signaling how they cannot stand films, and how live theater is superior, blah blah. Well, usually the films are vastly superior to productions, in both interpretation of the script, and complexity of execution. The film starring Oldman is an instance of that, I think. But it's all secondary to reading the text itself.
R&G is a nice play, but honestly it doesn't come off the page nicely. The same is true for late-Beckett. I'm a huge fan of these guys, but I never understood the obsession literary teachers have with only a handful of plays, like R&G, or Waiting for Godot. These are very specific, nerd-like, I would even go as far as calling superficial—pieces of art. At any rate, Stoppard is best appreciated when read off the page, or on radio.. he's just one of these guys. Indian Ink is really good.
The film is really the best it gets. It's perfect.
Wrote a paper on "Shakespeare in Love" (and the original Shakespeare) for lit in highschool.
My paper wasn't any good. Really in retrospect or at the time.
How he had reinvented it, reinvigorated it. (TIL about banished Rama and Sita from the Bhagavad Gita.) But then I realized it would just be easier to be a critic.
Anyways, truly when I lucked into big time screenwriting gigs it was in part because of the time I had spent writing a paper about Tom Stoppard's work.
I also remember watching "Finding Forrester" a lot. Punch the keys!
Care to elaborate this statement: "TIL about banished Rama and Sita from the Bhagavad Gita"?
Yes, a quick search on the subplot reveals nothing Romeo&Juliet-ish about it.
Nor "Shakespeare in Love"ish.
GUIL: Hm?
ROS: Yes?
GUIL: What?
ROS: I thought you...
GUIL: No.
ROS: Ah.
See now while I love this play I don't find that exchange notable. It's very plain, no? The implication is that one thought the other was going to say something but he wasn't. This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.
The alternative reading, where an entire exchange cleverly takes place without any substance, seems almost mistaken to me? In context it seems very clear it's "I thought you...[were going to say something.]" "No." "Ah."
No I think you are missing that what's funny about this exchange
It starts off with G thinking R has said something, but G is wrong - R didn't say anything. It ends up with G telling R he hadn't said anything, but again G is wrong, G started the whole thing off when he says Hm?
This is funny because R ends up thinking he'd imagined G saying something when infact the opposite happened.
It fits the characters well with G frequently being clever with no common sense and R having common sense but not being terribly smart.
This exact dialogue takes place in real life regularly.
One reason that it is funny is that it plays against that.
We the audience maybe forget for a moment that we are not watching real life. We are watching a drama or entertainment. So we expect something relevant to happen. That’s the convention.
The exchange plays with that expectation. It deliberately forces us out of our pleasant illusion and makes think us about our real experience - we are sitting in a seat and watching a performance, which is happening at that moment.
And nothing happens, just the same as real life
Yes, it's plain, banal, and even shallow; almost devoid of meaning. And there's genius in that. Who intentionally puts that in a play, without purpose?
It's the antithesis of Chekhov's Gun.
Sometimes, when lots of other people see cleverness but you only see empty banality, sometimes it’s a good idea to give a second thought.
i don-t think so. the stage direction before that dialogue is:
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first.)
if the dialogue should be clearly about who speaks first, wouldn-t the stage direction have been something like:
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first. ROS tries to say something but does not) ?
i mean - you could play it like that. But then to me some of the beauty of that dialogue is lost, that comes from the fact that for the spectator it-s not clear what is the subject of it.
I am here to recommend Jumpers. Not his most famous but one of his best. What a genius. RIP.
Well, "Arcadia" is good, but "Tron Legacy" & "Star Trek" are better. Famously he hated ghost writing, so I hope he can make his peace with it now.
The real inspector hound is a great short play for kids. Breaking the 4th wall.
+1. This play was my favorite piece of literature from school. The layers of brilliance blew my young mind.
Arcadia was the best play ever.
Agreed. Or at least the best non-Shakespeare play I've ever read, and among the best works of 20th century literature. I really can't recommend Arcadia highly enough. It's both deeply moving and extremely thought-provoking, clever, and intellectual interesting.
Not to mention funny!
He is not on a boat.
I wonder how much art and science never came to be because the people who would have created it didn't escape the Nazi death machine, unlike Stoppard.
The entire group of "Martians" (von Neumann, Teller, Pólya, Szillard, von Kármán tec.) were Hungarian Jews. More than half of that community perished.
There are many people who never make it because they grow up under the wrong regime or in a place where no one will publish or publicise them.
For what it's worth, a lot of people think the Nazis undermined their own war machine by persecuting Jewish scientists.
They absolutely did, and German science never recovered its former dominant position after Hitler.
People don't even realize that as late as 100 years ago, Americans would travel to Germany for first-class university education. Harvard was good for networking and decent for overall education, but top notch science was done in places like Heidelberg.
Its still the case today, its just that America has gotten louder about its academic accomplishments being a key factor in economic success.
Your average German/Austrian universities have plenty of ex-pat Americans, there for precisely the fact that the education systems have such variety between the two nations. They are understated and under-represented in mainstream culture about academia, but for sure there are still Americans making the pilgrimage to older universities, for the diversity and strengths they offer.
America buys a lot of people in for its universities today, although of course there are bright Americans. German universities today are stricter and more rigorous in general than American ones.
I think the USA, like the UK, does tend to use name recognition. Oxford and Cambridge use interviews to filter out people, but are disproportionately represented in power structures.
Nevertheless, when it comes to top research, Germany has become a shadow of its former self. No way around it. This graph speaks volumes.
Prior to Nazism, Germans would collect as many science Nobel Prizes as the British, the French and the Americans together.
https://preview.redd.it/nobel-prizes-by-country-manually-upd...
While I agree with you that Germany doesn't have the intellectual prowess it once may have had, I don't think you can consider the Nobel prize a valid metric, personally. The Nobel prize has subverted itself many times over.
While German academia was rebuilding itself, American academia was chasing clout - one side effect being that the Nobel prize is more of a carnival attraction than an academic accomplishment.
Judging validity of all Nobel prizes by something that isn't even an actual Nobel prize is a perverse logic.
> Germans would collect as many science Nobel Prizes as the British,
The person I responded to made this claim, not me. I don't personally rate the Nobel prize very highly at all, as a metric.
I was fortunate enough to see Leopoldstadt on Broadway. It was an absolutely brilliant, deeply moving play based on Stoppard's family history.
Steve Sailor's obituary is very much worth reading, too: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/sir-tom-stoppard-rip
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