William Shakespeare stole my soul

I cannot imagine my life without the arts. What an arid journey it would have been.

Raised mainly in small towns in rural counties, I didn’t spring from a household or a culture that offered much in the way of artistic endeavors or conversations about aesthetics.

When I was in grade school, the wall of my barber’s shop was adorned with a print of dogs playing poker. That was as high as art got most of the time.

There were, I must say, a few early flashes of different worlds and different ways of beholding them.

My father taught high school history for a while. He kept at our house history texts that included colorful, dramatic renderings of Civil War battles, as imagined or perhaps witnessed by the great painters of that era.

I stared at those pictures endlessly, studying the expressions of resoluteness or anger or fear on soldiers’ faces.

Later, Dad worked at a Baptist college, where his duties included booking performers for school events. As a result, we got free admission. Dad wasn’t much interested in this part of his job, but my mom was. With one or both of them, I attended several memorable concerts, although we rarely discussed them afterward.

I sat on the front row as Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman.” I heard the Tucson Boys Choir sing my favorite cowboy songs in perfect harmony.

We also went to college plays: “Inherit the Wind,” “Oklahoma,” “The Music Man.”

If there was a single transformative moment for me, though, it came in high school. By then I played football and wore my hair long and shotgunned beers off-campus at lunchtime and generally worked overtime to portray myself as a devil-may-care jock. (I doubt I fooled anyone with this affectation, but Lord knows I tried.)

In English classes, each year we were assigned a Shakespearean play to read.

Normally I tried not to read English assignments at all, much less anything as arcane as Shakespeare, with his mincing thees and thous and forsooths.

But for reasons now lost to me, one night I decided to take a crack at that term’s assigned play, “Julius Caesar.”

Within minutes, I found myself both exhilarated and terrified.

Exhilarated because I understood it. I got the plot.

Terrified because I liked it. The language was forceful, elegant and stirring, not what I’d expected. By the time I reached “Et tu, Brute?” I was a goner.

This seemed a disaster, the uncoolest thing I could imagine. What next? Would I join the freaking drama club? Audition for the mixed chorus?

But once art sets its hooks in you, I’m pleased to report, there’s no wiggling away.

I wasn’t about to admit it openly, but I became a closeted reader. Shakespeare had stoked a compulsion in me. In the evenings I pored over my other English assignments. They made me think about matters I’d never considered: time and betrayal and mercy and meaning.

The next day in class, I’d slouch at my desk, pretend to be half asleep, whisper to my classmates how boring this crap was.

Serendipitously, I discovered a football teammate who was a closeted reader himself. He introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut the way other guys introduced friends to LSD.

I didn’t know it, but art was changing who I was and would become.

On my first try at college I partied myself out of academia into series of tedious jobs. But I never quit reading: Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger and Flannery O’Connor and discount store potboilers. Stories great and small buzzed in my head as my hands mopped floors or emptied garbage cans.

When I eventually returned to the university, I majored in English literature. Then I earned a master’s in English.

I’ve since sampled every type of art I could find — openly — and loved them all. Well, I haven’t learned to appreciate opera or ballet. But everything else, yes.

I’ve seen plays on Broadway, back when you didn’t have to mortgage your house to buy a ticket, and at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

I’ve spent untold hours in art museums in New York, Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati.

I’ve developed a passion for old black-and-white films. I drive my wife batty spouting obscure factoids about pre-Code directors or B-list actors from the 1940s.

I’ve attempted to write. Briefly I even committed a few poetries, establishing myself as indisputably the worst poet in Western civilization. I made Edgar A. Guest look like Ezra Pound. But failing is part of artistic discovery.

I’ve learned that whether you’re staring at a painting or listening to a jazz band or attending a play or watching a movie or reading a novel, the best art does for your soul what the best religion does — and usually without overt proselytizing.

Art opens chambers of your heart you didn’t realize were there. It helps you recognize your humanity, with all the aspirations and glories and follies that implies. It allows you to find grace for yourself and prompts you to show grace to others.

Occasionally it even reveals to you, if through a glass darkly, the visage of God.

This story was originally published August 26, 2016 at 12:09 PM with the headline "William Shakespeare stole my soul."