Harry Hamlin breaks down Shakespeare's line about how thinking makes things good or bad. Objects and events have no inherent meaning, he argues. Meaning is something our brains create, turning neutral material into something that matters.
Shakespeare said it, I think, in one line almost as well as this entire book. He says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." So unpack that for me. What does that mean? That means that there's nothing real. We think there's intrinsic meaning in this book somewhere, but it's just paper and print. If nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that means the entire world and what it means to you is all contained in your gray matter. 'Cause nothing out here has any meaning. It only has the meaning that you attribute to it.
