And I suppose that this time it’s my fault. After all, I chose to read it. It was I who put again the drama in motion, had them woken up, summoned as it was, to Elsinore. “I come to bury Caeser, not to praise him” it was said in another play. But I think it comes to me to eulogize Rosencrantz and gentle Guildernstern. The news comes to my ears, even though I did not order it. To close the book is to turn the earth over on their coffins, but while the bodies are still warm, let us remember the men who could not themselves remember.

They would not be the first nor the last men to forget themselves. Just the other morning, while in the shower I convinced myself I could not recall my own past. The reasoning I took was this: so barely could I connect the person that I was seven years ago to the person I an now (then)–not because I was so changed–but perhaps because I was not, that I seemed birthed from that moment. I would have all but forgotten myself, had I not remembered.

But Rosencrantz and Guildernstern never had that luxury, even when confronted with their tragederian dopplegangers. And yet even as they failed to recollect their collective past, they were always somehow cognizant of their shared and inevitable future, their absurd and tragic fate.

My friends, I recognize myself in them. I too, far too often, am waiting for another to direct my fate, feeling as if I were conjured to act the part in another’s story, that my fate is already part of the plot.

But this is about them, not me. They gave us entertainment, came to us to divine our maladies at their expense. They were summoned for us, for our melancholy. That they should die, that’s just part of the play.