You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr Page A

which In My Humble Opinion derives basically from our desire to avoid imagining our parents doing it, leads to a really silly view of human nature. People use sex for many purposes. Certainly Shakespeare did. And his contemporaries. Take John Donne. Slightly younger than Bill. Donne 1572–1631. (Shakespeare’s dates? Hm? You in front, with the Lakers T-shirt. A guess, then. Dude , you can do it! What? Not bad, Shakespeare, 1564 to 1616.) During Vietnam, a war that we sort of fought before all of you were born, young men gained exclusion from military service if they got their wives or girlfriends pregnant, which gave the slogan ‘Make Love Not War’ a certain, shall we say, piquancy. ‘Better to make a person here than kill one over there.’ John Donne made the same argument in a poem called ‘Love’s War,’ on page 1068, where for example—ah, the sound of those pages riffling—where there are a few choice lines that never fail to bring a smile to my face. Just ask my wife. She’s sitting next to the big blond hunk in the sweatshirt, the one who looks so much like me. Wave, Anne. Thank you. Donne sees love as a constant, eternal war, only to him there are two kinds of war. You, yeah you, with what I’m sure is an absolutely lovely mezzo-soprano, or perhaps a basso profundo, please read and think of my marriage.”
    The boy unslouches a bit and begins to read aloud.
    Other men war that they their rest may gayne
    But wee will rest that wee may fight again.
    â€œGet it?” says Howard with a grin, and, after a rushed silent reread of the lines, frowning at the page, and finally equating “fight” with sexual activity, their faces say: “ Oh …”
    There lyes are wrong; here safe uprightly lie;
    â€œDonne means that telling lies in love is par for the course.”
    There men kill men; we will make one by and by.
    Thousands wee see which travaille not to warrs;
    But stay swords, armes, and shott to make at home;
    And shall not I do then
    More glorious service, staying to make men?
    â€œThank you. Nice voice. Where were you when we were casting Nemo? Now, Shakespeare, in his sonnets—quatrain, quatrain, quatrain, couplet—addresses the usual Elizabethan themes of immortality and beauty and constancy and all that crap, but we will skip Sonnet Number 18, the famous ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ where he modestly tells the girl that summer may fade and the sun grow dim in the commuter smog but she will remain eternally fair for the inarguable reason that he is presenting her that way in SonnetNumber 18, and we will skip Sonnet Number 29, which opens with the paradigmatic iambic pentameter When in dis grace with for tune and men’s eyes new line I all al one be weep my out cast state that makes such an icon of Sonnet Number 29, and we will skip Sonnet Number 87, the delicate Ode to Paranoid Insecurity that uses a cheesy flashback not even the schlockmeisters at Carolco would have touched, and stop at Sonnet Number 116, which treats sex a bit more seriously than does Mr. Donne and by which you should all prepare to live your lives or suffer failed marriages. I say this sincerely. Am I revealing too much? Remember that my wife is in the audience. You, in the black lycra cat-suit—page 809. People”—he looks up, projects to the very last rows of the amphitheater—“this one’s about expectations and reasonableness.”
    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    â€œIn other words, Shakespeare is saying hey, stuff happens in relationships. Deal with it.”
    Oh, no! Love is an ever-fixéd mark,
    â€œBill means love is an unmoving landmark.”
    That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wandering bark,
    â€œA ‘bark’ is a