{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Espresso Hour","title":"The Thinking Room: Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 — The Most Perfect Definition of Love Ever Written","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":389,"description":"In this episode of The Thinking Room on Espresso Hour, we sit down with the greatest writer who ever lived. A man born in a small English town in 1564 who somehow — in the space of one extraordinary lifetime — managed to understand the human heart so completely, so precisely and so devastatingly that four hundred years after his death, every single word he wrote still feels like it was finished this morning.William Shakespeare. And today — his sonnets.Shakespeare wrote one hundred and fifty four love poems over the course of his life. One hundred and fifty four small, perfectly constructed worlds of feeling — each one fourteen lines long, each one a masterclass in saying the unsayable. And out of all one hundred and fifty four — there is one that rises above everything else. One that gets read at weddings and quoted in letters and whispered between people who cannot find their own words for what they feel. One that has been translated into virtually every language on earth and has never — not once in four hundred years — lost a single drop of its power.Sonnet 116.\"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.\"In this segment, we read Sonnet 116 in its entirety — and then we break it down, line by line, the way it deserves to be broken down. Because this is not just a romantic poem. It is a definition. Shakespeare sat down and decided — I am going to tell the world exactly what love is. Not what it feels like in the beginning. Not how it starts. What it actually IS. At its deepest, most enduring, most uncompromising level.He tells us that real love does not change when circumstances change. That it does not walk away when the going gets hard. That it is an ever-fixed mark — a lighthouse — that stands completely still while the storm rages around it. That it is the North Star to every lost ship at sea. That it does not answer to time, does not bow to age, does not fade with the passing of years....","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/mEw3HMeQyUBp8YAdq6LTNBM0vxcr-R9748BV-z3mOmo/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82ZDBm/YzYyNTg3YWEyNTZk/MjE1ZTZmZjZlZThj/OTAwYi5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}