'There Is a World Elsewhere'

“For the crowd the present moment is absolute. It lacks memory.” 

All of us belong to crowds, willingly or otherwise. Some are happiest in crowds. It gives them, at last, an identity. Some of us dread them: in a crowd, personal identity counts for nothing.

 

I found myself in the middle of an impromptu crowd on Sunday in the grocery store. Poor planning: I didn’t know the Super Bowl was scheduled for later that day. Bill paid, shopping cart filled, I was approaching the exit when I heard shrieking female voices. Two women were behaving badly just inside the front door. The scene caused a traffic jam as shoppers stopped to watch the show. I was too far back to see much. The guy with a loaded cart standing next to me laughed and said, “Cat fight!” I sensed a ripple of excitement in my fellow shoppers. Sure, I rubber-necked some. But I was impatient to get home, and crowds make me nervous, a reaction intensified during the pandemic.     

 

A friend in New York City has been reading Coriolanus. On Sunday he copied and pasted into an email Coriolanus’ grand renunciation speech to the Roman crowd in Act III, Scene 3:

 

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air, I banish you;

And here remain with your uncertainty!

Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!

Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,

Fan you into despair! Have the power still

To banish your defenders; till at length

Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,

Making not reservation of yourselves,

Still your own foes, deliver you as most

Abated captives to some nation

That won you without blows! Despising,

For you, the city, thus I turn my back:

There is a world elsewhere.”

 

The speech always reminds me of the comeback line every disgruntled employee keeps in reserve: “You can’t fire me. I quit!” Banished from Rome, Coriolanus replies that he banishes Rome from his presence. His pride hobbles him yet he seems oddly admirable. By nature, Coriolanus is not a team player. He is solitary. His sensibility is the antithesis of crowd-think. “There is a world elsewhere” might be the motto of anyone who cherishes his privacy and independence.

 

The sentences quoted at the top are from the Coriolanus chapter in W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (Princeton University Press, 2000). Later in the same paragraph he writes: “Most of us, if we are not careful, are members of the crowd. It has nothing to do with what class we belong to.”

 

[I remembered the lines from Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (Kiss Me, Kate): “If she says your behavior is heinous,/Kick her right in the Coriolanus.”]