bourn

As Winterson described it in a recent interview, this is “Shakespeare’s undiscovered country, ‘from whose bourn no traveler has returned.’”

Paul Reubens has left the Earth, riding a sporty red-and-white bicycle into that Puppetland from whose bourn no traveler returns, but leaving us with his great creation and alter ego: Pee-wee Herman.

But is its destination — what Hamlet called “the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns” — merely an abrupt conclusion?

What Hamlet called “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” has wide-open borders in Brockmeier’s morose but clever tales.

In other words, was Hamlet right to call death an inescapable boundary, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns?”