There's a brief sentence in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth that continues to move me no matter how frequently I return to it. I's a passage that resonates in my latter-day soul.
Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet (whose name, obviously, indicates her profession) are old acquaintances and old rivals who are evermore at odds. "They never meet but they fall to discord." They seem to delight in exchanging insults. To Doll, Falstaff is a "muddy conger," "a huge full hogshead," "a poor ape," and even, when she is more affectionate, "a whoreson little tidy Bartholemew boar-pig". Falstaff is equally abusive. But at one point in the play, there is a magical moment when Shakespeare allows Doll to propose a truce.
"Come," she says, "I'll be friends with thee, Jack, thou art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares."
I think that what electrifies me is the last phrase, "there is nobody cares. " A less imaginative, less empathetic writer than Shakespeare would have ended the sentence more predictably: he would have written, "nobody knows" and would have therefore repeated the commonplace that the future is unknowable. But Shakespeare raises the ante -- as he so often does. "Nobody cares" is demotic shorthand for "nobody else but we two care"-- which I take to suggest that Doll reflects not that the universe is dicey but rather that we are each of us isolated and unimportant except as we are valued by our nearest friends and the people with whom we have gone through life.
The sentence is nostalgic in the best sense. It is not sentimental; Doll does not romanticize hers or Falstaff's past. Instead she faces the aleatory universe bravely. You are at risk, it could turn out badly, let's be friends now, all that matters is the moment. The sentence is valedictory and at the same time extremely warm.
Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto Doll Tearsheet. I'm at the point in my life in which I value (perhaps even treasure) the people whom I've worked with, or argued with, liked or loved. (I have even come to value some whom I've not loved.) They're all part of the fabric of my life and they are all disappearing, one by one -- going to the wars, we might say. And nobody cares. Except us.
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