“The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true. But it is lower than either of those arts, for it is forced to make its gaudy not-true absurd by putting it alongside the true. There stands Richard Coeur de Lion – and the plainly enough, also stands a poor ham. Relatively few reflective persons seem to get any pleasure out of acting. They often, to be sure, delight in comedians – but a comedian is not an actor: he is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of an actor. His work bears the same relation to acting properly so called as that of a hangman, a mid-wife or a divorce lawyer bears to poetry, or that of a bishop to religion.”
H.L. Mencken.
Yeah, I do think that the ‘bishops’, so called in the New Testament, are local church pastors.
I’ve got to remember: Don’t fall into the trap of living a role. Be a real person.
HT: Geneva Redux.
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