I wish I hadn’t made the rule that I’m not allowed to edit or even reread what I’ve written in these pages.  I was on a high a few hours ago about how good I felt, and now I’ve become obsessed about breaking that rule.  Well, maybe someday.

The reason I’m thinking about rules is the trouble kids are having as they try to adjust to school after all those long months of zoom and relative freedom.  Today a seventh-grader in the school that my grandson is going to next year slapped his teacher.  I understand that he is much taller than her, and she is in shock.  But I imagine that the whole country is in shock.  

I keep going back to the third act of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses explains why Troy has not been captured despite the long siege.

he specialty of rule hath been neglected:
………..
When that the general is not like the hive
To whom the foragers shall all repair,
What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans cheque to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
It hath to climb. The general’s disdain’d
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation:
And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

All right, it’s a long speech, but you got through it and you see it connects all loss of order.  When we can’t respect our leaders, everything in society goes awry, everything in the world loses its order.  So we have the leaders of the world in total chaos, the medical system unable to make use of the amazing progress it has made in curing disease because ….

I was interupted mid-sentence by the announcement that the building I have been living in for the past 40-odd years is probably going to be torn down and rebuilt in the course of the next two years as part of a plan of the municipality to urbanize the neighborhood.   How’s that for a fulfillment of a prophecy?  And it came from a place I wasn’t expecting at all.  

I said probably, but it is more and more certain minute by minute…