3/17/2004 07:50:00 PM|||Andrew|||A short quote from very near the end of Our Town, the play that I just got back from rehearsals for:

"STIMSON: (with mounting violence) 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--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!"

By way of explanation, this is spoken by Stimson, who has been dead for some time to Emily, who has recently died. It is a grim view, but one that tears into your very soul like a bullet. Can you read these lines, can you listen to these words, without your whole self being shaken? The one glimmer of hope for the living that the play provides is spoken a few lines earlier:

"EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: (Quietly) No-- Saints and poets maybe--they do some."

Read enough, let yourself be absorbed in the creative output of generations, and you will see this same sentiment flung out through time and space. So many, so many stumble through life not seeing, not seeing. And so very few people ever seem to catch a glimpse of anything beyond. Surely this is the work of the saint--of the poet--not to fully realize the beyond, because that is undoable, but at least to catch a glimpse. And this too must be my desire: that even if only for a single moment, I may experience, that I may Know life, that I might have life, even life to the fullest.|||107958184735609299|||