The great British playwright Tom Stoppard died recently at the age of 88. Ironically (though on brand for America), he is perhaps most widely known in this country for writing the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. This depiction of a sexy and exposed-chest but charming and approachable William Shakespeare won 7 Oscars, including best picture and best screenplay, and changed the slope of Gwyneth Paltrow’s celebrity from angled upward to meteoric. 

Stoppard was more widely known by people who know stuff as a playwright preoccupied with ideas. In its obituary, The New York Times describes him as a writer

who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw.

Sounds like something a Times obituary would say. 

The announcement of Stoppard’s death sent me off to watch some interviews with him and to read about his life and career. I was surprised at the length and breadth of his work — many, many plays, movies, TV shows. I didn’t know, for example, that he wrote the screenplay for Brazil, the wonderfully fanciful and dark movie by Terry Gilliam, long one of my favorites. I wasn’t surprised to find his interviews and events sparkling with wit and erudition, deep but not ponderous, self-deprecation tempered by self-awareness of his cultural stature. (His remarks on his relationship to posterity are now quite poignant as well as funny.)

I don’t know as much about plays as I should, Stoppard’s or anyone else’s, especially for someone who has dedicated his life to universities and ideas. Sure, I’ve read the marquee Shakespeares, Beckett, Ibsen, some Greeks, the texts that usually show up on a humanities syllabus and that sit, uncreased, in piles at a used bookstore. I’ve also been an audience member for several productions (again, mostly the Classics), though not nearly enough for my 30 years in New York.

But Stoppard’s work appeared in my life at two of its important hinges.

I left my small town for college to study engineering. I was good at math and science, and my high school’s aging college counselor, most familiar with counseling students who didn’t go to college, recommended that I apply those talents at the state school up the interstate that attracted small-town kids. I knew by the end of my second semester that engineering wasn’t for me, and I took enough English and Philosophy courses that I figured I might as well switch my major to Philosophy. I spent the first few college summers back in my hometown at various jobs (these were days before the unavoidable internship grind), but the summer before my junior year I remained near campus, took a summer class, and earned barely any money as the projectionist for the movie theater in the student union.

I remember few films from that summer (Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, e.g.), but one captivated me forever: Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead. This movie, written by Stoppard and his only directing credit, is based on his 1966 play of the same name. If you haven’t seen it, you should treat yourself. It’s Hamlet from the perspective of two characters who are both minor but also crucial to the plot and, as the title indicates, doomed. We spend most of the time outside of Hamlet’s well-known action, though the play does burst into the room at key points to remind us of the dramatic universe that Rosencrantz and Gildenstern occupy.

What universe is that? This scene, I think, exemplifies it all and still makes me swoon:

As a newly official Philosophy major, I had begun reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a seductive book in which he introduces the notion of a “language game,” essentially the ways in which language is embedded in and representative of a form of life. In other words, language is not just some abstract object but is instead an essential practice or tool that we use in the ways we do because we live the lives we do — a claim somehow equally obvious and elusive. I was chewing on this sort of thing when loading 16mm reels of Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead onto the student union’s aging projector and watched a scene of a literal language game. It’s not just a (funny, clever) game played for the sake of winning; Stoppard uses the scene to smuggle in existential questions. One central running joke of the movie is that though the two leads know they’re Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, they don’t know which one they are. When Tim Roth’s character asks “What’s your name” and “Who do you think you are?”, he’s not merely making a move in the game but desperately seeking answers that his universe has not given him.

I inserted a longer clip from the film above because it begins with Gary Oldman’s character dropping a ball and a feather at the same time to see which reaches the ground first. We’ve all learned from high school physics (and Galileo) that two objects dropped in a vacuum fall at the same rate regardless of mass, but, as Oldman’s bit hilariously shows, we don’t live in a vacuum. One could read Hamlet as an instance in which the universal, divine laws of monarchy have been shattered in the killing of the king by his brother and his queen quickly taking to the new king’s bed. And one could read Wittgenstein’s later work as abandoning the urge for abstract answers to philosophical questions in favor of privileging what we actually say and when to release the grip of those questions altogether.

That projectionist summer I was, of course, also preoccupied with what the heck I was doing with my life and where I was going, whether I should be invested in what seemed like a silly thing on which to spend one’s time and tuition. But here was a movie animated by those ideas in such a clever and hilarious way, making me believe that I, too, was making the right moves in the game.

Hinge number two: I did a semester in New York City my senior year of college and somehow became smitten with the city enough to scheme seriously about how to make a home there. After graduating from college with my little philosophy bachelor’s degree, I moved to Minneapolis for love and worked desk jobs until I couldn’t stand it. My scheming intensified, and the plan I decided to pursue, which sounds absolutely wild to me now, was to apply to philosophy doctoral programs in and around New York. My undergraduate professors strongly discouraged me from earning a PhD in philosophy, but I applied anyway and got accepted to a few programs, including one that I could mostly afford. My girlfriend (now wife) that I met during the New York semester was admitted to Columbia Law School around the same time, and we moved to NYC for good in 1994.

Tom Stoppard’s most renowned play, Arcadia, debuted at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in 1995. Arcadia is set in the same room in 1809 and the present and takes up themes of mathematics, physics, and love. Stoppard seems particularly interested in tectonic-level shifts in understanding triggered when something important can’t be explained using current intellectual tools. We experience so many chaotic, precious things, and a new non-Newtonian mathematics and physics was needed to make sense of them. Arcadia also plays with entropy and time, and how when striving toward an abstract understanding of the universe, we tend to leave out some of the most important parts of our lives, such as love and death, as we progress ineluctably toward our inevitable ends.

At least that’s what I think it’s about. I saw it during this run in 1995, with its stacked cast. Though I don’t recall how I found my way into that audience, I do remember the feeling of watching something exquisite, something I didn’t quite understand but was lifted and carried away by. I had left my hometown and state for New York City to pursue a PhD in Philosophy, to read hard books that almost no one bothers with and to think way too much about everything except for the fact that I was pursuing a PhD in Philosophy, quite possibly the silliest thing in the world a person could do. But the authors I read in college were now my instructors or lunch companions or speakers in rooms I had access to and spoke in myself, and the act of understanding — of thinking itself — seemed essential and alive despite being so difficult and strange. And I was somehow doing it all in a city in which I could witness a piece of art like this, one that expected me to be unafraid of playing, joyfully, with the biggest ideas.

I wish everyone moments like this, whether behind a projector in a mostly empty student union or in a full amphitheater in one of the world’s premier cultural institutions. May you find the question that is yourself seem, every now and then, like it has an answer.

Thank you, Tom Stoppard, for so many wonderful language games and for showing us — and me in particular — a way.