How much value is there in rereading books! I return to Lear again every year, often every month and rethink the entire work.
As a boy, I had a terror of the reaction to a moment of vulnerability in Lear leading to his violent outburts that destroyed him. Yet at that point I had never yet lived through such times and not yet seen how they would pass. Now I have lived them many times.
Or perhaps a more radical change is my attitude towards Cordelia with whom I saw so much similarity in myself as a boy. I felt that she truly was as Hegel thought the highest peak of humanity.
Now she seems merely a girl more given to principles than to emotions, unflinchingly dedicated to principles whose utlimate value is, at best, questionable.
Like Gandhi, I have gone from thinking him admirable to perhaps thinking him worse than the true demons – for a demon has none of the beguiling charm of the Mephistopheles who corrupts us.