Last week Emma read Our Town.
Yesterday we watched the play.

It is a simple, touching play.
I think it is intentionally ordinary so Wilder can make the point
that ordinary life is utterly beautiful.
The author (and characters) decides that the living never realize
what the dead know.
That you must be dead to finally realize.

But I disagree.

We are all touched by death and illness during our lives.

In fact, the only good thing about death is that it awakens us to life.
The same with illness.

But perhaps Wilder was speaking to a younger audience.
Teens and 20-somethings very often haven't experienced death, intimately.
It's always a shock to the young.

Don't most of you realize what a delicious blessing it is to be alive?
The absolute joy of looking into our beloved's faces?

I think you do.
It's sad to think of living any other way.


Below are some choice quotes from Our Town;


Womanhood

"Both of those ladies cooked three meals a day - one of'em for twenty years and the other for forty - and no summer vacation. They brought up two children apiece, washed, cleaned the house ... and never a nervous breakdown. It's like what one of those Middle West poets said: You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life ... It's what they call a vicious circle."


Marriage

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

Soul

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Do you realize?


"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?"
"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."



Encourage one another,
Donna


p.s. Wilder's vision of the afterlife was empty.
But it was not a religious play. Although,
don't you need God to have a heaven?
Odd to me.