14 May 2015

How Not to Choose a Theme

For Second Life's 12th birthday celebration, the organizing committee chose the theme "What Dreams May Come," a quotation from the play Hamlet. As so often, it seems nobody thought to check the source, which is Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  Here's the line in which the phrase appears:
To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
"Must give us pause," indeed. Hamlet is discussing the nightmares that may attend the afterlife, and his fear of those nightmares persuades him not to undertake the act he is contemplating: suicide.  So the SL12B theme pertains to death.  I wonder … maybe the organizing committee agrees with Wagner James Au that "Second Life is a dying world."  Interestingly enough, his av's name in Second Life is Hamlet Au.  Coincidence?  I think not!

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