From a Harvard Law School student, via the Harvard Blog, comes the Love Song of the Delaware Court of Chancery. It's very clever. But, alas,
The muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
becomes
the nimbly wrought conceits of high-paid lawyers in nearby hotels who work so hard all day for corporate shells.
There's something very sad there, that in a way captures the essence of the original.
As you, dear law professors, survey your students, don't you sometimes bemoan all that talent lost to other pursuits? Not that law is at all a bad thing. Been very good to me. But still. . .
I remember while in law school I still harbored dreams of being a writer – not the kind I am now, but the real kind. I took a graduate fiction seminar, a continuation of the seminars I took in college. The teacher was Richard Stern, perhaps the best non-famous American novelist. He told me that in order to be an even decent writer the first thing I had to do was quit law school. I tried to tell him about lawyer novelists and he only laughed at the names I mentioned.
Would-be-writers-now-law-professors, do these lines fit you?
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous; full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
Maybe. But still at least I left real writing to the talented. I did not overreach, to become at times ridiculous, almost, at times, the Fool.
Comments