Below is a version of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy from Hamlet, revised by Richard, a longtime member of LifeRing and a stalwart of its email groups. If Hamlet were wrestling with addiction, along with his other pressing woes, the Bard might have given him these words to speak:
To drink, or not to drink–that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The joys and sorrows of outrageous reality Or to bend arms against a sea of troubles And by imbibing, SEEM to end them. To drink, to be conscious No more–and by getting drunk we hope to shield ourselves from The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To drink, to stagger To pass out,–perchance to awaken: ay, there’s the rub, For in that rude awakening what horrors may come As we shake and vomit in this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes calamity of the drinking life. For who would soberly bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a wine or beer bottle? Who would ordinary living bear, To grunt and sweat under a sometimes weary life, But that the dread of something AFTER drunkenness, The familiar country, from whose miseries All booze-travelers return, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know too well? Thus sanity does make sobrietists of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution deepens in the sunlight of a made up mind, And reptilian excuses of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents slither away And lose the name of action.
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