THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

I get emails from Etsy. They send me things. (It's pretty exclusive.)

Under the "picked for you" items they sent to me the other day, one was a cutesy little print of a quote from Shakespeare that read, with a little doodly heart above it, "To thine own self be true." Now, to most people, this is a lovely phrase: "To thine own self be true." Because of its early modern English tone, it sounds so much more important and quotable than "be true to yourself, girlfriend!" or something of the sort.

But guess what? Seeing this made me laugh. A lot. Why? Let me tell you.

This quote comes from Hamlet, and is spoken by Polonius, an overly verbose, harebrained "chief counselor" of the king; the man who is supposed to be wise but is anything but. "To thine own self be true," he tells his son Laertes before he leaves the castle with many other cliches and aphorisms along with it. Shakespeare uses them ironically because they're coming out of the mouth of Polonius. It's a complete joke.

And someone is selling this on Etsy as a nice little framed print for someone to put in their home on the wall. And the funny thing is, people will probably buy it. Actually, they will definitely buy it. Which gets me to my point--so many people do this. They take one passage, one quote from some poem or play or novel or book of scripture and isolate it because of its warm, fuzzy, or otherwise "deep" quality without knowing the context behind it. 

It happens all the time. I could name so many more--Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," is one of the most glaring examples. What is generally taken to be a poem about the importance of individuality and making bold decisions, when read in its entirety, is actually completely indecisive in reality and leaves one with the unsettling feeling of ambiguity the speaker of the poem obviously feels about his decision to take the path he did. It "made all the difference," but was it good or bad? He can never know. 

If anything, you should want to know the context behind things like this to escape looking painfully uninformed. Though we can't all be English majors and study frequently misquoted works like this so often--which is not what I'm insinuating we should do--I think taking the root of this problem and applying it to life in general is important, because this idea goes so much further beyond the pages of literature. There's a context to everything: to history, to art, to music, to politics and world events. We owe it to those around us, and especially ourselves, to care more about the contexts surrounding us, to be informed individuals. 

With the emergence of social media and the internet and smart phones and all of the revolutionary inventions that supposedly make our lives more efficient, our generation is more wrapped up inside our own little bubbles of life than ever. Less and less people stay up to date on national and world news, less and less people know about anything beyond the borders of the land of the free. There are other people on the earth besides your 837 Facebook friends. I promise. Not keeping up on what's happening across the planet, choosing instead to scroll through a social media home page and see which restaurant some friend you barely know went to last night and who's dating whom and who just dyed their hairOMG, and then making really opinionated statements about things you don't actually understand or throwing out your own "to thine own self be trues," is actually quite devastating. But it's so prevalent.

So yeah. Want to be a more well-rounded, wonderful citizen of this world? 

Study the contexts. Be aware of the news. Read a book. Read anything. Actually try to understand the poem you're buying a quote from. Learn something new. Become an expert on Beethoven. I don't care. Just something.

(Can't believe a promotional Etsy email brought me to this conclusion, but hey. It happens.)