On Thornton Wilder's Town and Moments in Eternity
It has been a while since I've written a Substack post. So it goes. A lot has happened over the past few weeks: I started a new job and, after thirteen years of living in the same house, I moved into a new apartment. Predictably, it took time for us (my cat Tai Tai and me) to settle in. Unpacking all of my books and restoring them to my shelves took around two weeks. But, as I write this, I am surrounding by fully stocked shelves—all of my books have now found a place. The apartment is beginning to feel more like home; Tai Tai is sleeping peacefully on my lap. It will definitely take more time to feel completely comfortable in the new apartment, but I have gained the peace of mind to write. Small victories.
I have been reading a collection of plays by American playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). So far, I'm impressed. The plays have a playfulness (pardon the pun) that does not at all detract from the profounder themes—most generally stated, the human condition—that Wilder explores. Here, I want to focus on Our Town, a three-act play that was first performed on January 22, 1938, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey.
I don't want to give away too much about the play. I knew nothing about it, really, and part of the joy of reading it was how it did not at all match my expectations (whatever those were). For those of you who haven't read it, I'll just share the general tagline: it's a play that presents the everyday lives of citizens in a fictional American town—Grover's Corners—between 1901 and 1913. The play uses metatheatrical devices to bring in the audience while at the same time distancing the play's setting from that of the audience. For instance, one of the characters is the Stage Manager, who directly speaks to the audience and who, at different times throughout the play, provides commentary that is not directed at anyone within the play but is intended for the audience. The play thus thwarts one's ability to fully identify with or become absorbed by the story—the audience's/reader's awareness is regularly brough back into the present.
This is important. The play's three acts have the following titles:
Act I: Daily Life
Act II: Love and Marriage
Act III: Death and Eternity
Clearly, the play is meant to trace the cycle of life. Perhaps the only part that is missing is the time before birth. Even though this is not expressed in the title of Act I, the introduction of the town by the apparently omniscient Stage Manager—who stands before/above/beyond the town and its inhabitants and literally brings it all into existence through descriptions for the audience—suggests that the town's births are just as tied to eternity as its deaths. The creation of the town itself (our town—our lives?) is forged out of eternity as much as the inevitable end feeds right back into it.
Taking a slice out of the world—say, by picking out a town—and describing its life in time while also situating it all within a larger frame (eternity) is a beautiful way to highlight both the singularity and the generality of existence. Our lives are unique—and they've all been lived. Or, rather, from the perspective of eternity, they all will inevitably have been lived. Time will pass, we know this. But what are we supposed to do with this knowledge?
At a certain point in the play, a character named Emily joins the town's deceased in the local cemetery. She has died giving birth to her second child. Longing to be back with the people she loves, she is given the option by the Stage Manager to return—to observe people, even if she cannot interact with them. The others warn her that it is better to forget, that it will cause her too much pain to return, but Emily ignores them and goes on to relive her twelfth birthday.
She is delighted at first, but she is soon upset by her inability to engage with people. More than that, she becomes disheartened by people's incapacity to enjoy life's moments (which she, having died, now sees from a new perspective). "Oh, earth," she laments, "you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you." The realization brings her to tears. Then she suddenly asks the Stage Manager:
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?"
The Stage Manager's response? "No."
Here the tension reaches its height between living life and realizing the significance of life while living it. Wilder is not the first to suggest that these rarely go hand-in-hand, if they ever even can. Too much happens: we are distracted by so many things. Even if, from an intellectual perspective, we know (I alluded to this 'knowing' before—knowing that time will pass) that moments are precious and that life is wonderful and that we have to enjoy it as much as we can while we can, there are all sorts of barriers to actually realizing life's value as we are caught up in the midst of it. We might amend Albert Camus's complaint in The Plague in the following way:
"For really to [enjoy life] means [enjoying it] every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything; by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That's why life is difficult to live."
This is the dilemma. In sketching it, Wilder might have taken a cue from Knut Hamsun, who writes in On Overgrown Paths:
"But that's not what I'm trying to fathom, but this: that so few things last. That even dynasties give way. That even what is grandiose falls someday. There is no pessimism in this thought or reflection, only a recognition of how non-stagnant, how dynamic life is. Everything is in motion, bubbling over with vitality, up and down and to all sides; when one thing collapses something else rises, looks large in the world for a moment and dies."
Our town arose—and our town always gives way. How can we appreciate it? Recall that the Stage Manager tells Emily that no human being ever realizes life while living it. But, after a pause, he also adds: "The saints and the poets, maybe—they do some."
How should we understand this? I see it in two ways. First, people who are especially, finely, sensitively attuned to life (the saints and poets—artists) may catch glimpses of its significance. Not only that—they also have the ability to turn those glimpses into something concrete and shareable with other human beings. In this way, art can provide the pauses in life—the redirections of consciousness—that are needed for us to turn our attention back from life's vicissitudes to the realization of its meaning (whatever meaning we may come to ascribe to it).
In her novel Alberta and Jacob, Cora Sandel writes: "Perhaps something scattered and finely dispersed is always lying in the mind, waiting for a long, quiet moment in which to flow together and condense. Something indefinable." Some might argue that life's essence—its complete beauty—is indefinable. Human beings surely cannot fully grasp it. I think that parts of it, at least, can be made known. But we have to step out of life, just for a moment, to see.