A Book That Only 37 People Will Ever Read

Recently, while watching an episode of one of my favorite detective shows, Inspector Lewis, I heard the following quote: "I'm a scholar... I'd be perfectly happy to write books that only 37 people will ever read." This got me thinking. In a similar way, this is how I feel about acting. I'm one of those people who would be perfectly happy to do the full four hour version of Hamlet with all of the "irrelevant in today's world" (how I once heard a director describe about 2 hours of this play) bits. Why? Because I'm one of those people. You know, the strange ones who read books on the life of Shakespeare and Moliere for fun, not just when forced into it by a school assignment, or can actually recite bits of Shelley (Also the focus of an Inspector Lewis) because I genuinely like Shelley. Oh and The Canterbury Tales? Standard light reading for me. After I became involved in theatre when I was fourteen, my mother thought it was so strange that I genuinely seemed to like this stuff, but being supportive as always, one of my Christmas presents that year was a lovely leather bound edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which has proved a valuable thing to have over my past three years as a theatre student, plus, having lovely drawings and of course, all of the Bard's work.

But this post is not to extol one particular writer's work, or talk about leather bound books, but to examine what being an actor means to different people. In my experience (not wonderfully extensive, but definitely not limited, either) there are two types of actors: the ones who want to go somewhere, be famous, be rich, and have people know who they are, and then there are the ones who want to do the work because they simply can't stand the thought of breathing without it, who want to do the "dead" plays because they think they're fun, who like the camaraderie and fellowship of being in a company and who want to enrich people's lives and make them see things in a new way and understand things about life and art, that they previously hadn't understood before, no matter how much they aren't being paid. Now, this is not to say that the latter category can't be rich and famous, or that the former category doesn't care about art and the like, or that either one is right or wrong. And of course, there are many more facets to each type. To think that would imply that people are simple, and if theatre has taught me one thing, it is that people are never simple.

So I guess the real reason for today's ramble is considering the reasons why we do what we do in life. The majority of my life is spent working in some form or fashion on theatre based things. But why do you spend your life working on what you do? Some people I know work on things because they feel called by God to do so. Some people, because they just enjoy it. Some because they don't have a calling or love to work on so, they just go through the motions of life without any real purpose. Whatever your reasons for the things you do, whatever you do, whoever you are, make sure you love it enough that you would be willing to do the equivalent of "writing a book only 37 people in the world would read" because without passion in your life, for you life and pursuits there is only simple existence. And that in my opinion is the saddest kind of life there is.

As Stella Adler said "In life, as on the stage, it's not who I am but what I do that's the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit."