When Puck delivered his last monologue at the end of the play, it was also Neil speaking directly to his father: “Gentles, do not reprehend / If you pardon we will mend.” I found myself so moved not just by Neil’s sincerity but by the layers of nuance in those lines, of a fairy begging an audience’s pardon if they weren’t entertained, and also of a son for acting against his father’s wishes, while the actor who played Neil was also a son, and I wondered whether the actor’s own father disapproved of his profession, the choices he made in life.

I marveled over these complex ideas and realized, really for the first time, that I had a passion for literature, which I had nourished over many years without much of a thought. I started out reading books from America just to learn English, but in the limited scope of my life, literature evolved into the prime way for my imagination to transport itself to other worlds. Movies and television supplied me with an influx of images, but it was really books that stretched my capacity to come up with ideas, a quality I’d had for as long as I could remember but wasn’t aware could be put to any use. I couldn’t exercise my talents in the Philippines, where the smartest students routinely turned into doctors, which I, like Neil, was expected to become. The Philippines could not give me adequate training to be a great poet in English anyway, and I lived in a country where actors didn’t typically mine the depths of Shakespeare but rather appeared in cheesy comedies or telenovelas. Dead Poets Society unearthed my regret that the dream of America I’d nurtured as a child didn’t turn out to be true.

I was sure Neil’s father would forgive him after seeing how great he was, but the man took his son directly home and ordered Neil to enroll in a military academy the following day. While the rest of his family went to bed, Neil returned to his room, took off his shirt, and opened his window in the middle of a snowy winter. The next set of images would play in my mind repeatedly over many years, of Neil shirtless and shivering, staring longingly out the window, the white landscape around him an eerie blue in the middle of the night, the trees ugly and black like witches with gnarled arms. I knew something bad was going to happen but did not expect Neil to find his father’s gun and shoot himself, which I’d never seen a Filipino movie depict, in our Catholic country where suicide was the gravest of sins.