To Be Or Not To Be

I keep mulling it over in my mind, that odd English thing, the verb 'to be' which is, and was, and evermore will be 'be', implicit and complicit in all our dealings. What is it to be? Is it a continuous operation, requiring maintenance, like some sort of existential red queen's race? Is it a passive state, the state of existing without transformation or translocation? Is it what it is? Or is it just 'is'? I find myself baffled by the Hamletian assertion that 'to be or not to be' is indeed the question – was Shakespeare a bare existentialist?

To be is to live, it implies, and not to be is to die. Cessation of consciousness is cessation of being. And if one's mission is to be, then that is all. If one shifts to another state, does one continue to be? And if one's personal motto is to be better and better, for the rest is yet to become, then one's self is not always what one was, and one is not what one would have been in the past.

This is bad. And it may yet get worse.