Our Town
This evening I watched "Our Town" with my parents. It was nostalgic for us all since everyone in every generation seems to study it in school. To teenagers, it is a rather uninteresting day-to-day with a surprise ending about appreciating life; to adults, it's a universal experience of life across America, across time, and a gentle reminder from a stranger of the small intimacies that give our own lives meaning.
I suppose the irony is that the narrator is a complete stranger to us all, who tells of a different time and place, talking with great familiarity as if he knows each member of the audience personally, with an informal conversational style and topics on the insides of our lives. Topics are just the same today as they were a hundred years ago or more.
I've never liked "Our Town" (the play /movie, not the actual place where I grew up), and I didn't like it today either. I had more than just a "dislike" as a teenager. Now I am only neutral. In spite of that, I began to think about some things after viewing it that I've been turning around for a few years and could not articulate. Maybe I will try now.
The difference between my grandparents' generation and my generation is so vast. As a child I knew full well that I could never understand the depth of experience or wisdom that my grandparents had, and I was pretty certain I never would. Growing up around people who had experienced the trauma of face-to-face war, the "Great Depression" and the struggles of large families in uncertain times with far less medical care, I knew that I "had it easy" and felt ashamed most of the time without knowing why.
For the first time today, I realized that not only was I incapable of somehow inheriting their perspectives or the wisdom from lived experiences, but also they would never have been able to understand the strange burden of innocence and privilege. A Red Sea That Could Not Be Parted would always stretch across between us, too far to swim across. I try very hard to learn through books or movies how to get to the other side, but it's like building a ship that can never sail.
When someone loves you who has experienced struggle in life (and has come through it admirably), it hurts. All the emotional intelligence in the world cannot explain that, but maybe it shines a light on your shortcomings and makes you ashamed. It also makes you endlessly strive to be as constantly happy as possible, and if you ever feel pain you are ashamed to cry. It makes you seek out opportunities to sharpen yourself, or to push yourself into uncomfortable and sometimes meaningless achievements. Dangerous places seem inviting or even parental. Comfort and pleasure are things to be feared or scorned, while they alternate between reputations of vice and virtue. For example, gifts you receive must be extremely appreciated, but you must never express attachment to them. You cannot throw them away, but you will be told they define you as inherently spoiled. You cannot escape this place in history, this place of weakness and excess, but you feel constantly ashamed for not fully appreciating it. How dare you ever complain of stress - you who know not war, know not hunger, know not "real" pain. You will never earn the right to be truly happy, because you will never struggle, because someone else did it for you.
I sometimes think this responsibility to be happy without having earned it somehow is a new and different kind of struggle that my grandparents could never cross over and understand. Sometimes I wonder if God understands. I mean, I know in my rational mind that probably I can believe He does. But in my emotional mind, I can't figure out the idea of laying down one's life for someone else and then saying "There you go - this is for you, so make the most of it." I know that nothing I do in my life will make the suffering in my grandparents' generation worthwhile. No amount of extreme happiness or career success or anything can do that.
I want also to say something about Anne Frank, about her thoughts about movie stars during the war, etc., and relate it back to this topic. I am falling asleep. More next time. Hope any of this is making sense. Since nobody reads this, it only matters if I remember what I meant by it.