You have devoted your life to translating Ovid, but your guilty pleasure is ‘60s bubblegum pop.
You are a young woman who’s not shy about displaying her intellectual gifts or her perky breasts.
Thinking of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, you burst into tears.
You are a successful playwright in the prime of his life. Naturally, women love it when you mansplain to them.
All of your friends are named Nicholas and half of them are dying of tuberculosis.
You are wearing your wife’s party dress while she crawls around your living room in her underwear, your mother is standing on a chair on one foot playing the tuba, a detective eats a banana as a fruit basket is hoisted into midair, and there is a perfectly rational explanation for all of this.
You were discussing transcendental idealism over oysters, and one thing led to another.
Without any forethought, you deliver a lengthy monologue that connects the Riemann hypothesis, the poetry of Wordsworth, and your love life.
As you stir cream into your cup of tea, you recall the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
It is so bothersome how other people are always mistaking you for your best friend, or your romantic rival, or your identical twin sister.
You encounter a troupe of thespian funambulists. They are glib, and not to be trusted.
You’ll forgive a man for corrupting your wife, as long as he doesn’t corrupt the English language in the bargain.
In communist Czechoslovakia, you help a subversive rock band tour the country. The secret police arrest you for circulating bad Czechs.
How odd! The events of your daily life exactly parallel the obscure scientific theory that you’re researching!
Your fantasies involve hushed libraries, furtively exchanged letters, dirty words whispered in Latin. You and your tutor once spent an hour discussing three lines of Catullus, and it was better than an orgasm.
Though history may deem you a nobody, you are acquainted with everybody who’s anybody.
In this random and absurd world, your only consolations are sex, philosophy, and puns. It’s just a shame that those are the most absurd things of all.
Your dabbling in paradox puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.
You are not English, but you go to ridiculous lengths to act as though you were.
You are very English, and every foreigner you meet is vaguely ridiculous.
You have spent a long time contemplating whether you’d prefer to be alive in a box or dead in a box.
Your desk is a mess, heaped with books and papers. Luckily, your pet tortoise makes an excellent paperweight.
You cannot embark upon a conversation without running aground on the shoals of a humorous misunderstanding.
The misunderstanding is too much for you to bear. Bursting into humiliated tears, you flee the room.
You hand your briefcase to a minor civil servant named Chamberlain.
You are a brilliant and high-spirited woman, and therefore you are doomed to a tragically early death.
Sometimes you feel like you’re in a Samuel Beckett play. Or are you in a pastiche of a Samuel Beckett play?
Oh, so you feel like playing a game of Questions Only?
Do you think that Questions Only is the game that God plays with the universe?
You have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, and now you are alone on an empty shore.
“You encounter a troupe of thespian funambulists. They are glib, and not to be trusted.” – I never knew I wanted to play a Tom Stoppard text RPG until this moment.
Oh my god, that would be AMAZING.
‘circulating bad Czechs’ is an excellent pun, all the better for the fact I didn’t see it coming.
Agreed.
Tim Roth image on The Toast–that is everything I need today.
I AM HERE FOR THIS POST.
Specifically, every Arcadia reference.
I might have an Arcadia tattoo.
…. can i see it?
oh goodness i love arcadia with all of the bits of my being.
Please take this as an opportunity to tell us all about your tattoo if you would like to!!!!!
Seconded, need to hear about/see pictures of this tattoo!
I’ve now spent some time imagining stoppard tattoos that could exist. I think my favorite imagining is the following:
A “tramp stamp” of “look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else”
What would an Arcadia tattoo be? The rabbit equation?
Images I could imagine: a tortoise, a corkscrew, a gazebo, a side of beef, a grouse, rice pudding with a swirl of jam.
Most of the quotes I love are long enough that I’ve rejected them as tattoos for myself, although certainly not everyone’s opposed to long text tattoos. The best short quote from Arcadia for a tattoo might be “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.” or “One does not aim at poetry with pistols.”
Got it! It is indeed “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.” I got it when I finished my Master’s degree in librarian-ing.
NICE
I am a traitor to my generation because I often feel a bit squicky about tattoos, but that is glorious.
As a Stoppard fan, recently graduated with my Master’s in librarian-ing, who has been looking for a tattoo design, you are possibly the perfect inspiration.
DO IT
Wow that’s amazing. I’m considering a tattoo having just finished my MLIS, but I could not better this.
You don’t have to better it! We compete in neither librarianship nor tattoos.
Okay, amazingly, that’s my tattoo in the link there. From when I first got it.
I WIN.
You know my tattoos better than I do – I was actually trying to find that photo so that I didn’t have to take another one, but I gave up 🙂
I google image searched “stoppard tattoo”.
This is not the first time I’ve done that.
I am sitting here trying to imagine what that string of images would sound like if you didn’t know Arcadia. Not that everyone wouldn’t want a tattoo of a side of beef, of course.
I’m imagining each of those images as this sort of … technicalish line drawing?
sort of… like…
All black lines… except the rice pudding.
There is a nonzero part of me that wants to get all of them in a row somewhere. maybe not the gazebo. Maybe a hermitage instead? I’m also not sure if I’d do the grouse, because it’d probably be a dead grouse……
In my mind, the jam is swirled like a picture of a spiral galaxy.
And honestly, since the first thing I think of when I think about Arcadia is my Brit lit professor’s lesson on gardens (Dr L would be, I hope, pleased that she had such an impact on my initial experience of this play that I’d remember it 10 years later), I’d have to advocate for just a garden trailing up one arm.
SWIRLED JAM TATTOO
To this day, Septimus is my top-three favorite roles I’ve played as an actor.
I DID NOT REALIZE THAT I NEEDED THIS DESPERATELY UNTIL THIS VERY MOMENT.
Somehow this is both a devastating skewering of Stoppard’s tropes and a heartening reminder of his genius. I am pleased.
You’ve just put in to words what makes the best of the entries in this series so enjoyable. It’s an affectionate skewering, with a sprinkle of love for the author’s works and a pinch of awe for their talent.
Laughing at Stoppard tropes, leading to remembering how wonderful Stoppard is, leading to thinking about Arcadia and The Invention of Love and getting a little misty eyed NO I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING
well, and that’s Stoppard for you
My friend and I watched R&G are Dead and loved it so much that when we got to the end, we rewound to the beginning and watched it again, right then and there.
Rewound!!! That takes me back. 😜
It was, indeed, the 90s. Rented from Blockbuster, as one did, possibly along with Universal Soldier, because of Jean Claude Van Damme’s naked ass.
“Thinking of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, you burst into tears.”
IT US.
PERHAPS THE WHOLE OF THE TOAST IS A PLAY BY TOM STOPPARD.
I am ecstatic and all my dreams have come true? Because even if I die or get dumped it will be in glorious language forever and ever?
I directed Arcadia at university exactly 4 years ago, and it was… not a very good production, but I loved every moment of it, and had so much fun. Half the people were typecast as themselves, too, which made organising rehearsals a bit difficult.
I played Bernard in my college’s performance a good… oh lord like six or seven years ago now. Good times, good times. My characterization of Bernard was basically “imitate my boyfriend.” Even borrowed from his wardrobe for the costume.
MANY FEELINGS ABOUT THAT COAST OF UTOPIA REFERENCE
Oh, shit. This explains a good many things in my life. Excuse me, I really..excuse me. I need to go hop out of this holes in my fourth wall.
Chip, chop, cheerio then. For a moment, I was concerned that I was living in a Wes Anderson film, but this seems to have cleared things up.
Would anyone like to discuss Catullus with me in the original latin?
II. fletus passeris Lesbiae
Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid lubet iocari
et solaciolum sui doloris,
credo ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas!
‘You were discussing transcendental idealism over oysters, and one thing led to another.’
My life all over. Except for the oysters.
I am glad I put my coffee down before I started reading this, as I just cleaned my keyboard today…
In this random and absurd world, your only consolations are sex, philosophy, and puns. It’s just a shame that those are the most absurd things of all.
TOO REAL.
TOO.
FUCKING.
REAL.
Tom Stoppard came up this weekend during our Star Wars marathon, and I had to explain who he was to someone I knew who also had never seen any Star Wars movies before. I needed this then. Sending it to him now.
“Thinking of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, you burst into tears.”
I have done this more than once.
“Without any forethought, you deliver a lengthy monologue that connects the Riemann hypothesis, the poetry of Wordsworth, and your love life.”
I specialize in lengthy, cross-disciplinary monologues, all of which are (at least covertly) about my love life. They differ from Stoppard mostly in that I am the only one who finds them interesting.
“How odd! The events of your daily life exactly parallel the obscure scientific theory that you’re researching!”
Change “scientific theory” to “literary critical method,” and this is absolutely true.
“Your fantasies involve hushed libraries, furtively exchanged letters, dirty words whispered in Latin. You and your tutor once spent an hour discussing three lines of Catullus, and it was better than an orgasm.”
I cannot tell you how hot making out in the stacks is. Wait, actually, I can. I stayed in a relationship four months beyond its actual endpoint because Beloved had after-hours library access.
“You cannot embark upon a conversation without running aground on the shoals of a humorous misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is too much for you to bear. Bursting into humiliated tears, you flee the room.”
Good grief, Marissa, were you hiding under my dining room table this morning?
“Sometimes you feel like you’re in a Samuel Beckett play. Or are you in a pastiche of a Samuel Beckett play?”
BOTH AND.
yay!
You spent the Great War in Zurich suing James Joyce over the cost of a pair of pants.
BLESS THIS PERFECT LIST and it’s beautiful references to Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia and everything that is perfect and also the worst about Stoppard.
(It confirms what I already suspected.)
I like how, at least at first, this almost reads like some kind of point-by-point chronological synopsis.
What a joy to discover a secret society of Stoppard devotees! This list, and everyone’s comments, give me hope that humankind is not decaying into a brain-dead reality TV haze. Or at least not as quickly as I thought. :/
Thanks so much for your wit and generosity. Sincerely. Thank you.
Do you think that Questions Only is the game that God plays with the universe?
Does that mean that everyone throwing out overblown sophistries are losing?
You are Indian. There is ink. 😉
A disturbing number of these DO relate to my life. I think I really AM in a Tom Stoppard play.
Oh my god, that would be AMAZING.
PERHAPS THE WHOLE OF THE TOAST IS A PLAY BY TOM STOPPARD.
well, and that's Stoppard for you
I love love loved seeing Arcadia on Broadway. Magnificent. The best review I ever read of the play included the line “Fortunately this is Stoppard, though, so it is fairly safe to assume that Arcadia involves a lot of clever people who wittily discuss ideas and then hurry off to have sex with each other.” So accurate.
This is everything and I’m ashamed to have missed it when it first graced the virtual universe.
This is everything and I'm ashamed to have missed it when it first graced the virtual universe.