The 'Our Town' conundrum

Today I watched parts of the Paul Newman version of Our Town, a play I had heard about but never seen. I just wanted to watch the end where Emily goes back in time to revisit her life as a twelve year old. Overcome by the richness of the mundane events she asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" Answers Newman's stage manager, "No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some."

This conundrum has been part of my life for years. Once I said to my friend Katie, "wouldn't it be nice to be able to travel back in time and see what things were like?" By this I meant go back in time with today's eyes, to walk around and see everything as wonderful and strange. She said no. I took it to mean that Katie, as a nature lover, had a different sense of time. Going back 20 or 30 years wouldn't make much difference to the way you saw a forest or mountain range (conservation concerns aside). I then assumed that my desire was really an urban one and that urban living created a temporal sense that potentially led to wistfulness. I even wrote a story about this. A villain is being hunted down by primitive natives. He runs toward a hill where he unveils a time machine. "Behold!" he says, expecting the savages to bow down before him in awe of his invention. Instead, the savages rip him to pieces. "I could have told you" winces our hero. "Time travel is fascinating only to city dwellers."

About 15 years ago my mom got stomach cancer which is often fatal. I asked a friend what it would mean to make the most of our time together. She said, "why don't you buy her some flowers?" When I asked Maria the same question some years later, she said, "what kind of stupid question is that?" What she meant is that the nature of our existence is such that we can only let things slip by. We do not and wouldn't want to live our lives with Emily's sense of retrospect. My mom, by the way, is still alive and kicking.

When you have children the Our Town conundrum always comes up. Everyone will tell you, "enjoy them while they're young... they grow up so fast." Yet you can't look at your kids as you would in retrospect ten years from now. Instead of treating them as people you'd treat them with fascination as museum pieces.

Noise film has strands of the Our Town conundrum running through it. The conundrum is about consciousness and how our consciousness changes things and our appreciation of events. Let's say that your leg gets chopped off. You bemoan your fate and get angry and depressed. Now let's say that you're given an outrageous cosmic choice. Your first born child dies or you get your leg chopped off. Most of us would choose the second option, of course. In both cases, you end up the same. But the second instance is easier to take. Your loss, as a sacrifice, takes on a vastly different sense of significance. Another way of looking at it is to say that our beliefs play a great role in how we respond to events. Maybe we would all be happier if we could manipulate our beliefs in such a way that we lived in peace and gratitude. But beliefs are given to us. For many things, we are subject to beliefs, not the other way around. And that is one way to think about the ending of Noise film.