Ironically, the very meagerness of the historical record has been something of a boon to this Shakespeare industry, lending credence to an entire subgenre of sometimes wildly speculative notions from authors perhaps overeager to find some new revelatory scrap in the thoroughly picked-over carcass of Shakespearean scholarship. One need only glance at the veritable library of books devoted to this pursuit to uncover head-spinning pronouncements insisting that Shakespeare was a secret homosexual, a Catholic spy, or the author of the King James Bible — to name just three theories that have been seriously floated in recent years. Besides their implausibility, all share a common theme: Shakespeare was an extraordinary writer, and so it stands to reason that he must have led an extraordinary life.

This desire to aggrandize the life of Shakespeare has found its perhaps inevitable conclusion among those who choose to dispense with that life altogether. These “anti-Stratfordians” — a motley and growing assortment of intellectuals, fringe academics, and devoted dilettantes — contend that the paltry list of humdrum facts surrounding the life of the man from Stratford-upon-Avon could not possibly describe the same genius who produced such monuments of English literature as Hamlet and King Lear. In the poor player’s stead, the anti-Stratfordians have argued for a host of late 16th century luminaries who were supposedly better equipped to be Shakespeare than Shakespeare, a list that’s included everyone from Christopher Marlowe to Francis Bacon.

This “authorship question” has been making the rounds for over two hundred years, but the 20^th century saw the debate pick up steam, and not just among well-read cranks – along the way the anti-Stratford movement acquired such famous adherents as Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X. What led these men, along with so many others, to adopt a theory that mainstream scholarship had so completely and convincingly dismissed? And why, in the light of overwhelming evidence for Shakespeare as the true author of the works bearing his name, does the debate continue to flourish?

Those are the questions James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare attempts to answer. Shapiro isn’t so much concerned with making the case for Shakespeare’s authorship (though he does dutifully trot out the evidence in the book’s final chapter) as he is in profiling some of history’s more well-known Shakespeare deniers in an attempt to make sense of the underlying question in this strange debate: Why, to put the matter simply, isn’t Shakespeare good enough?

The reasons range from simple classist snobbery to a need among some to either exalt Shakespeare on the one hand or dethrone him as a bolt-from-the-blue literary god on the other. But for Shapiro, the fundamental disagreement between Shakespeare boosters and those who argue for someone else as the author is essentially a philosophical one. On one side are the anti-Stratfordians, many (but not all) of whom methodically disassemble the plays and poems for insight into what “Shakespeare” thought, felt and directly experienced, reasoning that he couldn’t have possibly composed his works without leaving some trace of himself — intentional or not — behind.

On the other are Stratford supporters like Shapiro, who take an agnostic view regarding just how much of his life Shakespeare transmuted into art and argue that it doesn’t much matter anyway — Shakespeare surely borrowed from books, recycled overheard stories, and invented from whole cloth as much as he drew from the details of his own life when writing – everything is impossibly tangled together.  These different approaches to reading Shakespeare, Shapiro argues, collapse into one simple question: can fictive literary works exist as independent creations wholly removed from their authors’ experiences and feelings? In other words, does the author of a written work of fiction necessarily stamp her head and heart onto every page of her creation, leaving her true self buried somewhere in her art, where it patiently waits to be teased out by those perceptive enough to uncover it?

For most anti-Stratfordians, and indeed for many modern observers who accept the view that Shakespeare from Stratford was the author of the works, the answer to the last question is a resounding “yes.” One need only survey the most recent Shakespeare pseudo-biographies to find critics citing passages in the plays as evidence of everything from Shakespeare’s true religious affiliation to his feelings about the death of his son. But the anti-Stratfordians, not content to simply psychoanalyze Shakespeare through his writing, build on this assumption by arguing that the humble glover’s son couldn’t possibly have written the plays and poetry attributed to him, because he couldn’t possibly have known about or experienced most of what he wrote. They point to the Stratford Shakespeare’s lack of formal education, his provincial status, and his largely cloistered existence as evidence that he would have been incapable of producing the works attached to his name, with their erudition, worldliness, and intimate knowledge of royal courts.

As Shapiro makes clear, such readings of Shakespeare are all based on a singularly modern (and mistaken) way of interpreting the works, one which assumes that all writing is, on some level, autobiographical. We want to find Shakespeare somewhere, and given the dearth of other information about him, what he wrote down is the best and only country we have to explore. But as Contested Will affirms, the profound humanity of the works can sometimes lead us astray, and when we gaze too long into the seductive mirror of Shakespeare’s worlds, we may sometimes forget that it is our own reflection staring back at us.

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal’s crude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

This is wonderful, wonderful stuff. Borges is ostensibly honoring Dante Alighieri here of course, that cornerstone of Western literature who died in bitter exile at Ravenna, but the crux of the story is Borges’ conception of the true nature of reality (also advanced in Paradiso, XXXI, 108 – a companion piece of sorts) as an idea so beyond our ability to comprehend it that it can be delivered to us only in a dream, whereupon waking we remember almost nothing of what was revealed, save for the feeling that we have “received and lost an infinite thing.” For this was a truth that would have awakened us to our true purpose in life, a truth through which we would have found redemption for every sorrow and hurt that we’d suffered, a truth that would have made everything make sense. Tragic enough. But the real tragedy, Borges argues, is that we could never grasp this truth even if it were told to us in waking life, for the nature of existence — with, among other things, its labyrinthine web of connections between everything and everyone — is simply too inscrutable for human beings to understand. As Borges himself put it:

What about truth? I don’t know. It would be very strange for us to be able to understand it. In one of my short stories I speak about that. I was rereading ”The Divine Comedy,” and, as you will remember, in the first canto, Dante has two or three animals, and one of them is a leopard. The editor points out that a leopard was brought to Florence in Dante’s time and that Dante, like any citizen of Florence, must have seen that leopard, and so he put a leopard into the first canto of the ”Inferno.” In my story, ”Inferno, I, 32,” I imagine that in a dream the leopard is told it has been created so Dante can see it and use it in his poem. The leopard understands that in the dream, but when he awakens, naturally, how could he understand that he exists only so a man could write a poem and use him in it? And I said that if the reason he wrote ”The Divine Comedy” had been revealed to Dante, he could have understood it in a dream but not when he awoke. That reason would be as complex for Dante as the other one was for the leopard.

To Borges then, to describe the true nature of reality, or the “meaning” of existence, to human beings is every bit as bootless as trying to explain a poem to a leopard. We simply lack to capacity to fathom it. It’s a sentiment as tantalizing as it is unnerving.

What is surprising is just how early Washington’s apotheosis began –  if contemporary critics such as John Adams could sneer of the then-general that “the people of America have been guilty of idolatry in making a man their God,” it was an accusation that revealed more about Washington’s overwhelming popularity than it did about the foolish credulity of a too-enamored populace.

At first glance, it seems strange that George Washington would be the man to inspire such adulation. He was a largely unsuccessful general, a mediocre public speaker, not deeply educated or widely read and, whether by a sense of 18th-century decorum or personal inclination, at times coldly aloof. Yet in the midst of these failings Washington possessed two inestimable credits that served to cement his status both in his own time and for all posterity: a remarkable ability to lead, and a preternatural sense of his own role in history. It was his stolid persona that provided an immovable center in a chaotic age, when simply holding things together — whether it be the underfed, underclothed, and at times mutinous continental army or the bickering states of a nascent republic — was in itself an almost superhuman task. And far from shirking off the title of father of his country, as his avowedly insular nature might have led him to, Washington understood (however reluctant he might have seemed) that he had been chosen both by his fellows and by fate to be the embodiment, if not the architect, of the new nation — a role that Washington, obsessed with appearances both sartorial and political, took up with aplomb and must have on some level relished.

But due to the many years which have passed since his death, and the endless, turgid panegyrics of admirers that have followed ever after, Washington the man has receded in the popular imagination to almost phantasmal status, replaced by an incorruptible ideal whose memory is manipulated by shrewd politicians as much as it is puzzled over by historians. Ron Chernow, in the preface to his sprawling Washington: A Life, puts it succinctly when he describes George Washington as “. . .the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.”

It is in Washington: A Life that Chernow seeks to pump blood back through the marble veins of that enigmatic Washington, to reveal him as a human being of grave flaws and quotidian concerns, but also as a man of deep feeling and unbending patriotism.

That makes for a deceptively gargantuan undertaking for a biographer of Washington. Despite his voluminous correspondence, almost all of which is available to historians, Washington chose to reveal precious little of his interior life in his letters, and second-hand accounts of the man are largely marred by either uncritical hero-worship or dubious criticism by political opponents. For a man who became a myth even while he was still alive, uncovering the “real” George Washington two-hundred and eleven years after his death might be beyond the ken of even the most diligent scholar.

All the more impressive then, that Chernow’s book succeeds so completely in masking both the years of research that went into its creation and the inevitable blind spots in our knowledge of Washington’s life, barreling along for 817 pages with all the readability of a work of narrative fiction. Chernow makes it clear that he doesn’t simply want to retrace major events — he wants to peer, as much as is possible, into Washington’s head and heart.

Given such a design, speculation is of course inescapable, especially concerning personal details, but to his credit Chernow deftly re-constructs a convincing image of his subject from the host of epistolary clues which have come down to us. He confidently weighs in on everything from Washington’s tempestuous relationship with his estranged mother to a (perhaps) life-long romantic preoccupation with Sally Fairfax, the wife of Washington’s friend George William Fairfax. Chernow also makes an intriguing case that Washington’s famed phlegmatic nature owed as much to his physical disabilities — the worry that his dentures might fall out if laughed too hard; a pronounced hearing loss in later life which served to isolate him from those around him — as it did to his own temperament.

As for Washington the public figure, Chernow’s portrayal is more crisply drawn, even if it at times tilts toward adulation: Washington is presented first as a virile, intrinsically heroic general and later as a judicious — if reluctant — President; a person whose outward stoicism and gentlemanly manner mask the reality of a man possessed of a passionate, selfless love for country and kin. His foibles, including a (very American) tendency to rack up enormous debt in order to keep up appearances, are hardly the stuff of scandal.

Indeed, Washington as presented by Chernow comes across as a being of no real faults, save for the one incontrovertible failing of Washington’s personal and political lives — his refusal to publicly support the abolition of slavery, or to free his own slaves while he lived. But even on this count Chernow doesn’t quite know how to condemn his hero completely, vacillating between criticizing Washington for his implicit support of slavery on the one hand and subtly praising him for his “theoretical opposition” to slavery on the other. Chernow wants to present a nuanced view of Washington as a man vexed by the issue of slavery while at the same time both economically dependent upon it and prescient of the fraction it would cause in a country only recently united, but at times one gets the feeling that he’s trying too hard to preserve Washington as a perfectly noble protagonist.

It is considered axiomatic, at least for most Americans, that George Washington was a great man. And this is undoubtedly the truth. But in reading Washington: A Life, one idly wonders just where the man ended and the myth began — especially in Washington’s own mind. Chernow provides glimpses throughout the book into Washington’s obsession with status and prestige (borne, perhaps, of his own perceived shortcomings in birth, education and wealth) and when reading of Washington’s professed love of theater and preoccupation with outward appearances, it’s tempting to think of him as “the actor of his own ideal” as much as the gentleman farmer reluctantly heeding the call of his country time and again. Certainly the notion of internalizing the world’s perception of you is a common trait of most famous (and not so famous) people, and must be especially tempting when that perception so closely conforms to your own ideal.

But to peer into Washington’s character in this way is undoubtedly a bridge too far, even for the psychohistorical musings of Washington: A Life. Chernow’s fine book never fully succeeds in separating the legend of Washington from the reality, but that may be because so much of the legend was the reality. Clearly, there was truth in George Washington’s myth, or else his myth never would’ve taken hold.

Author: Ron Chernow / Publisher: The Penguin Press 2010

(Excerpted from Norman Davies’ Europe: A History)

“In all works of science fiction, there are ten hidden assumptions regarding alien races. None of these assumptions is a necessity. None of them makes immanent or inevitable sense. Yet, when we read a sci-fi novel or watch a sci-fi movie we tend to accept all of them as inescapable. They amount to a frame of reference and to a language without which we seem to be unable to relate to all manner of exobiology. We evidently believe that life on Earth is a representative sample and that we can extrapolate its properties and mechanisms of action wide and far across the Universe. The principles of symmetry, isotropy, and homogeneity apply to the physical cosmos: Hydrogen behaves identically in our local galactic neighbourhood as it does in the furthest reaches of the Cosmos. Why shouldn’t life be the same?”

http://www.globalpolitician.com/26483-aliens-extraterrestrials-seti

“Vanishing Georgia comprises nearly 18,000 photographs. Ranging from daguerreotypes to Kodachrome prints, the images span over 100 years of Georgia history. The broad subject matter of these photographs, shot by both amateurs and professionals, includes, but is not limited to, family and business life, street scenes and architecture, agriculture, school and civic activities, important individuals and events in Georgia history, and landscapes. The wide variety of the collected visual images results from efforts by archivists from the Georgia Division of Archives and History who sought, between 1975 and 1996, to preserve Georgia’s endangered historical photographs. Designed primarily for preservation, the project located, selected, and copied historically significant photographs held by individuals who wanted to share their pieces of the past with future generations.”

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/vanga/html/vanga_basic_search_default.html

You may wonder what caused these two men, each from such wildly different social orbits, to collide. The answer was Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, a man whom even the kindest observers would recall as a poetaster, vainglorious brat, and worse, but who despite his faults had succeeded in ensconcing the married Wilde in a consuming, if highly dysfunctional, love affair since the early 1890′s. Wilde, for his part, loved Douglas deeply, but also seemed to understand that their relationship was at best sycophantic and at worst emotionally abusive. The fact that Lord Alfred’s father was a wealthy, well-connected homophobe did not help matters, to say the least. Still, despite their problems and amidst frequent separations, Wilde and Douglas remained almost fatalistically entwined.

To say that the Marquess did not approve of his son’s relationship with Wilde would be a massive understatement. Queensberry, a blustery man who shared Lord Alfred’s quick temper and rash judgment, proved increasingly unhinged upon discovering the illegal union, and had on several occasions threatened Wilde with physical harm in an attempt to end the affair. Wilde had of course succeeded in deflecting Queensberry’s verbal assaults (during an intimidatory home visit by Queensberry in 1894, Wilde, referencing the Scottish nobleman’s contribution to boxing, quipped “I do not know what Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight”) but at last the invective succeeded in wearying Wilde, and forced him into taking legal action against the Marquess, a tremendous miscalculation that would set in motion his tragic downward spiral from world-renowned author and playwright to penniless exile.

Things had come to a head on February 28th, 1895. That Thursday morning Wilde had made his way to the Albemarle Club, the trendy London gentleman’s club of which he was a member, and was immediately handed a note by the club’s hall porter. The note, left there by Queensberry ten days earlier, was scrawled with the nearly illegible slur “To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite” (sic). It was the final straw. The next day, an exasperated Wilde, goaded on by Douglas (at this time well estranged from his father), swore out a warrant for the arrest of Queensberry on libel charges.

The ensuing trial proved disastrous. In an effort to establish that his insult was true, and therefore did not constitute libel, Queensberry had used his money to hire several private detectives. The detectives scoured London searching for dirt on Wilde, and they found it, unearthing evidence of a series of encounters between the ostensibly heterosexual writer and male prostitutes. In light of this development, the publicly wounded Wilde was forced to drop the charges against Queensberry.

From there things got worse. With evidence now on the table that Wilde had consorted with other men, he was immediately arrested on charges of engaging in the nebulous crime of ‘gross indecency’ with another male. The jury was unable to reach a verdict in the trial that followed, and a new one was ordered. This time, Wilde was convicted. Presiding Judge Sir Alfred Willis proved less than sympathetic:

It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried. . . .

He gave Wilde the maximum sentence allowed by law: two years of hard labor. That night, as Wilde was processed into Newgate prison, the Marquess of Queensberry went out to a celebratory dinner.

Though he survived his sentence, life in a harsh Victorian prison broke the delicate Wilde. He was forced to sleep on a cold, hard plank bed, subsist on a diet of gruel, suet, and water, and defecate into a tin pail, among other humiliations. When he was finally released on May 19th, 1897, he fled to the continent where, after yet another failed attempt to reconcile with Douglas, he was to spend three destitute years in and out of hotels before dying in Paris.

As for the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, he died on January 31st, 1900, almost a year before Wilde. He left a small fortune to his son, who proceeded to squander it, though tellingly could not be troubled to provide even the most modest support to his former lover Wilde, a man whose life he, too, had a hand in wrecking.

Despite his tragic end, history has vindicated Wilde as both a great wit and writer, just as surely as it has damned the Marquess to infamy for his role in instigating the sad affair. As fellow Irishman William Butler Yeats said of Wilde: “He was an unfinished sketch of a great man, and showed great courage and manhood amid the collapse of his fortunes.”

Of course it’s unfortunate that such courage was necessary, but it does expose the real tragedy of Wilde’s plight: that of an enlightened man living in an unenlightened age.

If you’re interested in the story of Wilde’s life and career, I would highly recommend Richard Ellmann’s fantastic 1988 biography of Wilde, which I used as the source for this post.

Of the many entries that Moseley made on that fall day, one in particular was destined to tantalize and frustrate the admirers of no one less than William Shakespeare for hundreds of years afterward. It read, simply: “The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare.”

Now one of the great footnotes in Shakespearean lore, the play, as purportedly written by the Bard and John Fletcher, is wholly lost to history, though the British author Lewis Theobald later claimed both to have a extant copy of Cardenio (three, in fact) and to have used it as the source for his own play, Double Falshood; or The Distrest Lovers, a contention that, like almost everything associated with Shakespeare and his work, has been the source of endless scholarly debate.

Still, the notion of a lost play by Shakespeare is not a terribly hard one to accept, especially when you consider that the playwright himself – despite assertions to the contrary elsewhere in his work – seemed perfectly content with the possibility of literary oblivion, at least as regards his plays. Though Shakespeare himself did not own the rights to his plays (his acting company did; and these companies were reluctant to see into publication plays that were currently popular) it also seems apparent that the Bard was not altogether concerned with safeguarding his work in the form of publication (his major poems — The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis — being notable exceptions) instead forcing providence to rely on the good taste of those surrounding him to see to it that his brilliance remained preserved for subsequent generations. It is one of the most humbling and unnerving facts of history that some of the central texts of Western culture could easily have gone the way of Cardenio were it not for a long sequence of happy accidents, and indeed were, to their author, implicitly nothing more than the most ephemeral entertainments, to be consumed in the moment and eventually forgotten.

This is not to say, however, that Shakespeare gave no thought to his legacy, or was not occasionally possessed by a desire for the immortality that art can bring. As alluded to earlier, he speaks eloquently, and prophetically, in Sonnet XIX:

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

This rather bold statement, that of keeping the poet’s beloved (or “friend” if you’d prefer to ignore the homoerotic subtext) forever young in the lines of his verse of course has little meaning if the verse itself is eventually swallowed up by “devouring time.” Conventions of the sonnet form aside, Shakespeare here betrays a trait shared by both the very worst artists and the very best: a belief in the transcendent power of their ability, and a faith that that ability will inevitably result in their own artistic immortality. Unfair as it perhaps is, humility doesn’t get you remembered.

So just why then did Shakespeare — whose plays were popular enough in their own day and who was well-admired as a playwright even by his contemporaries — not care enough to make the effort to preserve the writing he had done for the theater?

It’s all idle speculation of course, but perhaps Shakespeare viewed his poetry as comprising the whole of his literary legacy, with the plays seen as mere products of his day-job (as of course they were, however sacrosanct we now hold them) and hence possessed of temporary value at most. Certainly the theater-going public of the time must always have craved something new, to the abandonment of what came before, much in the way that movie-goers in our own day marvel at the latest Hollywood blockbuster one weekend and completely dispense with it the next. It’s entirely possible that Shakespeare, practical man of the theater that he was, viewed the plays as — to twist Ben Jonson’s memorable line — “of an age” and not for all time.

In any event, modern scholarship seems convinced that we have most of Shakespeare’s plays intact, which is a blessing when you stop to consider how much of the writings of other great authors that we’ve irrevocably lost. Of the works of the three great ancient Athenian playwrights — Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles — only a tiny fraction have come down to us. The poems of Sappho are almost all fragmentary. Homer’s earliest poem, mentioned by Aristotle, is gone. Then there are the works that were simply left unfinished by their authors, a list that includes names from Dickens to Tolstoy. And that’s to say nothing of the brilliant works of art and literature that we don’t know we’ve lost.

Barring a major discovery, no one will ever again read Cardenio as written in Shakespeare’s hand. Nor will anyone ever again hear the closing lines of some lost tragedy by Sophocles, lines that were sounded out for the final time on some unknown date in antiquity and then never spoken again. And therein lies the inherent fascination, of course — these lost works inspire our imagination, they cause us to reflect both on what might have been, and what was but is no more, and never will be again. They come to us now as a sort of memento mori, a reminder that even our most well-wrought objets d’art are subject to the same fragile impermanence as everything else; that nothing can escape the vagaries of time.

Which leads us to a much more personal thought: what, as individuals, will remain of us after we’re gone? Surely most of us would have to admit that we are more groundling than playwright within the theater of the world, and that our memory will probably not long outlive us. So why does it matter so much to so many of us that we be remembered after our deaths? Surely lasting fame is not a prerequisite to doing good in the world. George Eliot, in her novel Middlemarch, famously commented on the fact that even those forgotten by history can have an affect on it:

. . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

So why should we so abhor the idea of resting forever in those unvisited tombs? One could dismiss it as simple narcissism, or fear of the complete annihilation that forgetting carries with it — and these may constitute pieces of the puzzle. But I don’t think they tell the whole story. A larger part of the truth, I believe, consists of the notion that it is not remembrance in death that people really seek — it would scarcely do them much good anyway — so much as it is remembrance in life. For what is contained within the concept of remembrance is of course affection, but also connection. And connection — meaningful communication across the silent gulfs that separate us from one another — is perhaps the most central human desire. Shakespeare’s laissez faire attitude toward the preservation of his plays is a revealing illustration of his need to delight, first and foremost, his contemporary audiences, with little regard for the future. Even his proud exhortations to unrelenting time in sonnet XIX are tempered by a certain wistful resignation; the work is more a testament to the most evanescent and fleeting affection than it is a monument to posterity of that affection, and it is only by the desire of its author to preserve the strength of his feeling in the moment that it remains something meaningful for us after that moment has faded, as it will for others who come to it after us.

Of course the clearest path to this sort of connection lies in the pursuit of art.  Art has as its central theme the desire to communicate through modes of expression unavailable to everyday speech. Anyone who has ever painted a picture or written a poem has desired, on some level, to speak to other people in a way that skirts the inherent limitations of language — that appeals to the mute heart in all of us. Artists idealize reality in order to reveal it to their audience, and when they’re successful, the effect on those who receive that art is one of being deeply moved, because we feel that the artist has captured some essential truth which we, too, have always felt but lacked the means to express.

If the artist is successful in moving enough people, of many backgrounds and ages, then he or she is inevitably canonized. From then on we study that artist’s words, or paintings, or music — not just because it gives us pleasure to do so, but also because we hope to find in it a revelation of some deeper meaning that is constantly on our horizon but never closer — a raison d’être that forever eludes us, but of which a glimpse is available in the best art.

Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Homer are all dead. But they speak to us now because what they spoke to us then was so deeply and immediately true. We mourn the loss of their works because we long to be in the presence of the truth that they, by the miracle of their genius, were able to uncover about us. And we can imagine, rightly or wrongly, that in those long-lost texts was some new insight — perhaps the insight — which would finally let fall the curtain that divides us from a clear understanding of the world and our place in it.

It is not literal immortality that the serious artist seeks, it is only to peer behind that curtain, as the luminaries who have preceded her have done, and to let spill some of its hidden light into a darkened world that she, and everyone who comes after her, must inhabit. It is the only monument that matters, for it is the only monument that remains, so long as people remain.

Birthed in the hearts and heads of people who existed on society’s fringes, it had its immediate origins in everything from a Greek kid’s bored tagging [PDF] of his name on New York City subway trains to the Godfather of Soul’s choice in drummers to the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

But if any one man can be termed the “father of hip hop”, that man would almost certainly be Clive Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc. Born in Jamaica in 1955, Campbell moved to the South Bronx in 1967, where he began deejaying at neighborhood parties. In his sets, Herc incorporated two major influences from the land of his birth — the enormous sound systems then prevalent in Jamaican dancehalls (Herc later called his the “Herculoids” — to get an idea of their size check out this YouTube clip) and “toasting” an oral tradition with its roots in Africa that involved the DJ rhythmically chanting or boasting over the music — it, along with other African-American rhyming/singing customs [PDF], laid the groundwork for what would become Rap.

Herc’s own contribution to the genre was born out of a simple desire to keep crowds at his DJ shows moving: discovering that the “break” — typically the part in a song where the music drops out and only the drums remain — was what party goers liked best, he decided to extract that portion from the record and loop it over and over. Since he didn’t have access to electronic sampling, Herc accomplished this by setting up twin turntables, playing the break on one record until it ended, and then quickly switching, or “cutting” over to play the duplicate break on the other record.

Again betraying a Jamaican influence (for more on the Jamaican connection to hip-hop see this article) Herc would go on to play louder, more extravagant DJ sets in public places, like parks, where the work became so much that he had to hand MC duties off to Coke La Rock, who is widely regarded as the first MC in the genre. It was at these outdoor shows that he introduced new people to the art form, including such Rap godfathers as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, both of whom attempted to emulate his style, and both of whom would go on to much greater renown.

The reasons DJ Kool Herc never achieved success beyond his now well-recognized roles as both progenitor and originator are myriad, and range from the fact that he never recorded an album of his own, to being quickly overshadowed by the same artists he helped nurture, to his being unable to keep pace with advances in technology. (For his part, Herc blames a stabbing incident at one of his shows for his downfall).

Whatever the reasons, one thing remains certain: anyone writing a history of hip hop must begin with DJ Kool Herc.

For a deep, readable account of hip-hop and it’s origins, check out Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. For the history of one of hip hop’s most famous breaks, the “amen” break, see this short YouTube documentary.