Best. Stoppard. Ever.

There are no charms that soothe the savage beast like going to see Arcadia with people who want to discuss it. (The award for Most Endearing Thing Anyone Has Said to Me in Quite Some Time goes to this comment: "Keep talking about the play....")

Physically speaking, Arcadia is not a very intense play. It is set in a single room, and most of the time people are sitting at a table.

Mentally speaking, Arcadia is dense, rich, stimulating material. Where else do considerations of time, literature, math, and sex overlap and interweave so intricately? What other play ends with a reminder of connectedness and (simultaneously) of disparity?

Thomasina mourns all the lost knowledge of the past, symbolized for her on a large scale in the burning of the library of Alexandria: "How can we sleep for grief?" Valentine says any knowledge of value is lost only to be found again. Yet we who watch the play see that the knowledge that is lost is not only mathematical, or literary. Over time we lose, not mere equations or poems, but life, all of the nuance and interactions of life.

Septimus puts it best: "We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."

To the writing of many poems and the formulating of many equations there is no end. Most of life lies in the "unimportant" details and the undocumented moments. Time is not guaranteed, so put down the pen while you can— and waltz.