luctor et emergo

Just saw a final dress rehearsal of Doubt, A Parable at PSC. Good, a quality play. Might go to pay what you can night on Tuesday to say it again. The play is a good example Father Flynn’s sentiments on parables, they need to be fictional, real life is to fraught with moral uncertainty for any lesson to be revealed simply, and in the case of the play itself, there is no good parable to be found. I walked in expecting a preachy show, but came out doing a lot of thinking but with no clear answers. This is what I look for in good theater. Brecht and his sentiments make me want to fortify my viewpoints and engage in trench warfare. This was a simple argument with no solution.

Talking with Maureen today after the Sunday matinee of Philadelphia, Here I Come! about telling stories about old friends: “It’s like after someone leaves your life for a year or two they become fiction,” she said. “You want to say to someone that they were real people, that they walked down the street just like you and I but for all other people know it seems like they might have never existed.”

I think that’s part of what I look for in people, I want to share in the personal narrative. Life in the end is so transitory that in response there’s the need for someone to be able to recollect these experiences with to prevent them from becoming fiction. Old friends become, characters you aren’t sure you didn’t just imagine if there’s no one there to say they remember them.

One of my friends keeps an intensely cross-referenced, hand-written diary of most every day of his life, it extends several volumes now. He does this out of fear that he might one day forget what has happened to him, to lose respect for the sheer weight of history which has pushed him to the current moment. It’s something I respect greatly though I am more lax and willing to let things slip. I’ll admit, it’s one of the reasons why I blog, the past is so fleeting and our memory so easily mistaken.

In the end all we will have to talk about is what happened to us, and what is going on now, but what if there’s no one there to remember with?

Walking up to my apartment, I saw three girls in jilbabs pass under a street light as they walked to an apartment across the street. Their silhouettes were so alien and yet so beautiful, they looked like a race of new creatures come to populate our empty world.

It makes me happy to live on the hill.