What a difficult one it is to learn. So many wonderful things and people pass though our lives and we never fully appreciate them. What and who else that we foolishly assumed would be here forever are going to vanish in our lifetimes? I can list hundreds of pleasures, delights and wonders that I now miss dearly, from Cinerama to “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride” to Jack & Marion’s Deli in Brookline, Mass. to a dear friend who helped get me (partially) through Grace’s sudden death over the past two years and who recently cut me out of her life for no discernible reason. Hanging Boulder wasn’t one of those under-appreciated features of my life, but it could have been.
In “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s heartbreaking play about the people in a simple New Hampshire town called Grover’s Corners going about their ordinary lives, Emily, a young woman at the center of the story’s romance, dies in childbirth. She is told that everyone who perishes is allowed to relive a single day in the life now completed, and she chooses her 16th birthday. Emily is overwhelmed by what she had forgotten, and cuts the ordeal short.
“I should have listened to you,” she says to her companions in the town graveyard, “That’s all human beings are! Just blind.” A bitter man among the dead replies,
“Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know. That’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to.Ignorance and blindness.”
Emily, however, is not bitter, and explains the phenomenon in more generous and, I think, accurate terms in what is “Our Town’s” most famous speech. To my ear, it is one of the greatest in the annals of American drama, short, simple, and profound:
“Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you!”
When I first read the play in junior high school, I couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about. Now, the speech devastates me every time.
Goodbye, Hanging Boulder.
I have not read Our Town since 10th Grade.
Maybe I should read it again.
-Jut
Like many great plays, especially O’Neill, it is far better seen than read.
I think “Our Town” is awful. It strikes me as Thornton Wilder looking down his nose at people he considers to be small minded and inferior. Plus, it’s fairly morbid. Probably matched by only “The Great Gatsby” as a grossly over-rated work inflicted upon unsuspecting high school students.
What do you really think?
Based on Wilder’s life experience (he lived in China and Italy as well as serving abroad in the armed serfices), most critics conclude that he used a simple New England town to portray universal humanity, and that his focus was neither strictly American or classist. He was also a weird duck, mysteriously obsessed with philosophy from childhood. What is it in the play that reads as condescension to you?
The characters seem like clumsy stereotypes which he seems to hold in contempt.
I’d have to revisit it. Saw it done professionally one summer in college and then a few years ago in a local high school production.
But I did attend a dinner party hosted by his daughter in New Haven with my soon-to-be ex- college girlfriend. Ms. Wilder was very elegant, “but she didn’t have much to say.” New Haven royalty.
“but she didn’t have a lot to say.”
Probably my favorite Beatles ditty. A pub song?
This is the first play I remember reading in school and it developed in me a lifelong interest in live theatre. I now volunteer as an usher at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA and I am enthralled. I feel so lucky to be working with so many talented people even in this small way.
After reading your post and contemplating the cultural enrichment I have gained as a result of reading EA, I read the sign in the photo explaining the weight distribution of the rock.
Knowing that the support of the overhanging mass was unknown, wouldn’t the allowance and encouragement of a photo op be unethical? What if it had fallen on Sydney Sweeny during a sport bouldering advertising photo shoot?
Bite your tongue …
It would have been breaking news!
The arch in Aruba collapsed in 2005, a real disappointment for tourism. It was beautiful.
Your story reminds me of a visit to Rock City in Tennessee a few years ago, a difficult-to-describe park with so many natural formations that are fun to explore, and a Lovers’ Leap viewpoint that reveals scenery in seven states on a clear day. Worth a visit.
Was someone able to determine the boulder was at risk of falling beforehand?
It was always at risk of falling! That’s what made it a “wonder.”
Did they stop people from posing beneath it at any point prior to its collapse? No one was killed?
A miracle!