Every Man For Himself

I finished reading Everyman yesterday morning, although the edition I completed reading from was different. Instead of a modernised edition (such as the Cawley displayed below), I read an original, Middle English edition from the anthology of Early English Drama. Perhaps a quirky wont of mine, an inner romantic antiquarian in me, but I have a knack for reading and comprehending older English writing much better in its original spelling. Annotations and editor's notes help with translating archaic meanings, which, in turn, help to maintain a sense of the metre's rhythm. This is something I find intrinsically essential to understanding as much, if not adding more meaning to a seemingly basic mystery play. Even heading into my fourth year as an English major, I have yet to find a simple explanation for how I can extrapolate meaning, intuitively (also called 'thin-slicing' by Malcolm Gladwell), from an inexplicable mental sense of rhythm. That's the major difference between an expert and a commoner, one possesses a vocabulary to explain what another takes for granted. I can attest to this, in retrospect, when I think of the essay I wrote on Disgrace, which was a clear-cut example of an allegorical reading.

Gosh. It's starting to show that I'm reading more Malcolm Gladwell, this time, The Tipping Point. I can't help it, his writing, ideas and style are infectious. He's Canadian, too.