Since I have no other recollection of Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies, it's strange how two scenes have made such a lasting impression on me. In one, Inspector Clouseau is committed to a mental hospital because of his pathological rage over an enemy, the mere thought of whom drives him beserk. In another, he has hired someone to lie in wait for him in his own house and attack him at any time unawares, so that his defenses will be sharpened. It is such a perfect metaphor for what we do to ourselves. We scream in outrage at the injustices that are done to us, when perhaps we have chosen them. I realize that's a huge statement. How could we ever willingly have accepted the horror of this world? I remember seeing a woman on the street of my home town, one of most horrifying apparitions I have ever seen. I am not normally so intuitive. One look told me everything. Dachau. The word formed in my mind. Later my mother confirmed my intuition. I was rather depressed myself. The woman screamed when she saw me. Perhaps it had been a long time since she had met anyone as depressed as she was.

A friend of mine likes to challenge what I write. She doesn't buy what I say about Shakespeare. Think about the kahunas hidden away in the West Maui Mountains, she says. And the pharaohs. They didn't want their bones moved. Look how people would kill for bits of the Buddha. Fine. You don't have to believe me. Read the scholarship. I admit that my own conclusions are questionable. Shakespeare never presumed to be more than a poet and playwright. Why would he have left a verse that proclaimed himself the secular messiah subsequent generations have found him to be? It would have been completely out of character. No one accorded that kind of recognition to Shakespeare in his own lifetime. The scholarship is compelling that Hal's bitter rejection of Falstaff had its origins in Shakespeare's rejection by his patron, the Earl of Southampton. I have not read speculation why the Earl might so cruelly have cut off his great friend, perhaps because it's too obvious. As honored as he must have been by the superb poems dedicated to him, and charmed by the witty poet, he must finally have been angered by flatteries he could not have understood as originating from a consciousness untethered to sexual bias. Speculations that Shakespeare was homosexual or bisexual are absurd. He was a romantic. For a while.

Why bother? Even Shakespeare couldn't do it. Though he moved so many, the world is no better. And in the end he didn't care. Only that his bones didn't get buried with his wife's. She must have been awful. I had one like that. I'd be really upset if my bones got buried with hers. Come to think of it, that was the only reason I married her in the first place, but never mind. The odds of that happening are infinitely small, unless you look at it from the big picture, which, in a very big universe, means that we're all buried together in a very small plot indeed. This is troublesome only if you are bothered by such considerations. The question is, why was Shakespeare? He sold out, that's why. Couldn't change the world. Gave up. Fell back on fame. Forgot his immortal soul. Think about that. If Shakespeare tanked, anyone can sail.

I can't tell anymore whether I am more or less moved to self-deception than others, but I try not to be. So it is with caution that I relate a fairly unremarkable experience that nonetheless held mystical overtones. I've become an avid swimmer. It clears my head, restores my health and, despite a certain amount of physical exertion, I actually enjoy it. I drive up the highway a short distance to the beach park at the south end of Maui's vast original resort complex, Ka'anapali, where there is an old cemetery between the road and he beach. It so happens that I don't like cemeteries, but this has turned out to be the perfect place to park and shower. I enjoy it so much that I have begun to go with the moment. I don't get in the water right away. There's no hurry. And there has been this strange feeling tugging at the borders of my mind for days now, evoking that same curious phrase that came to me before when I camped in the rocky bluffs further north. The iron hills. Being suggestive, I suppose, of something ancient and immovable. The magical offshore island. The glorious Lahaina mountains. Idyllic palms curved elegantly over the water. I lay back on the sand with my fins on, let the sun bake me, and sank into to such a profound peace that time stopped in paradise. So this was why those old tombstones cluttered the sandy ground. Other people had felt the same on this spot. They wanted to be buried here. Where there was no death.

As befits a strange story, it begins strangely. An Indian air force pilot on a routine reconnaissance flight over the Himalayas espies an antique monastery clinging to a peak in the middle of nowhere and comes in close for a better view. The moment is soon forgotten but has been recorded in a quick succession of shots that so fascinates the military brass the pilot is called in for questioning. Did he have any idea what he had photographed? He is handed photos of a yogi meditating in lotus, so oblivious to the world he takes no notice of a jet streaking by on a strafing run. All around him at a distance of some feet the ice and snow has been melted away from the sheer heat he is generating. This is high altitude Himalayas. Brutal cold. Unimaginable heat. For all that this implies, defense has a vested interest in that sort of power. The military brass would like to learn a thing or two from that yogi.

They never did, but the story got out. And so it was that I found myself trekking through the Himalayas.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A portrait painted 400 years ago and kept anonymously in an Irish home for much of the time since is now believed to be the only painting of William Shakespeare created during his lifetime.




The image reveals a wealthy Shakespeare of high social status, contradicting the popular view of a struggling playwright of humble status, according to Stanley Wells, a professor who chairs London's Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Wells, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, arranged for three years of research and scientific testing which confirmed it was painted around 1610, when Shakespeare would have been 46 years old.

"A rather young looking 46, it has to be said," Wells said. Shakespeare died in 1616.

The Cobbe portrait -- named after the Irish family that owns the painting -- shows Shakespeare with rosy cheeks, a full head of hair, and a reddish brown beard.

The most common portrait of Shakespeare is a gray image showing a bald Bard with a small mustache and beard, and bags under his eyes.

The identity of the man in the portrait was lost over the centuries -- until Alec Cobbe saw a portrait from Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library. That painting, which fell into disfavor as a Shakespeare portrait about 70 years ago, turned out to be one of four copies of Cobbe's portrait.

The portrait "shows a man wearing expensive costuming, including a very beautifully painted ruff of Italian lacework which would have been very expensive," Wells said.

"It establishes, for me, that Shakespeare in his later years was a rather wealthy, a rather well affluent member of aristocratic circles in the society of his time," Wells said.

"There's been too much of a tendency to believe that Shakespeare, being the son of a glover, coming for a small town in the middle of England, that he necessarily retained a rather humble status throughout his life."

Wells reads even more into what he sees in Shakespeare's newly-found face.

"I think it's plausible as a portrait as a good listener, of somebody who would have been capable of writing the plays, clearly the face of a man of high intelligence," he said.

"It's the face of a man, I think, who betrays a good deal of wisdom in his features. But, of course, as somebody (King Duncan) says in Shakespeare's story Macbeth, 'there's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.'"

It should be noted that Shakespeare's King Duncan paid a price for judging Macbeth to have the face of an honorable man. Macbeth later murdered the king.

The public can read Shakespeare's face from the original painting at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon where it goes on display for several months starting April 23.

The portrait then returns to the Cobbe family, which inherited it when an ancestor married England's Earl of Southampton -- a friend of Shakespeare who likely commissioned its painting.