The Hamlet Project

My friend’s husband is a pretty elegant guy. He wears tailored clothes and knows a lot about design. He is a champion of aesthetics in a lot of ways. When he became a parent, one of the things he marveled about was how primitive the experience was – how it all came back to the very base experience of the body. Eating, sleeping and shitting, essentially. I think he was particularly astounded by the shit.

And as death gets closer to us, we return to that same primitivity. We become eating, sleeping, shitting machines. We begin base, we end base – and in the middle, we are, of course, just as base as we are at the ends, we’re just better at hiding it, better at focusing on other things in addition to the things that are base. And once our lives are done, our bodies become literally part of the base of the world. We become dirt. We become dust. We are the basest of all.