It seems a bit strange, but somehow I’ve lived all these years without reading or seeing Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town until this afternoon. I had the idea that it was a nostalgic piece about a simpler time, but that’s not it at all. For one thing, the play contains plenty of bitter truths and does not present a sanitized vision of “the good old days”. The lack of props and sets, the stage manager who addresses the audience, the simultaneous presence of past and present and future: these were all revolutionary when the play was first written, and I think Wilder used them to capture some fascinating truths about how consciousness works and what art is for. Wilder wrote, “I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” I’ve thought before that art helps us deal with being thinking meat, and this to me describes one of the ways that art works. I don’t know why it’s so important to share our experiences of what it means to be human, but it is. Maybe it helps teach us how to live well, but I think more likely the most important thing it does is to alleviates the loneliness of being a conscious animal.
Wilder continues, “The supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always now on the stage.” Somewhere (I wish I could remember where) I read that the subconscious doesn’t know time in the same way that the conscious mind does. For the subconscious, everything is now. This is why it can feel so astonishing, even years after the fact, that someone close to us has died and is no longer here. In our subconscious mind, that person is still here, so how can she be gone out there in the world? The shifting nature of time in the play felt connected to that subconscious eternal now. However, Wilder also writes of the “now” of the stage: “The personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being…” I am fascinated by this link between the arts and the study of human consciousness. Bernard J. Baars, in In the Theater of Consciousness, suggests that the scientific study of consciousness is an extension of what humans have been doing for centuries through the arts: “to apply the mind to its own understanding.”
The point of the play is that it’s a great gift to be here, in this moment and at this place, and that even the most mundane of events and objects are worthy of our attention and love. The catch is that except for “poets and saints”, it’s hard to realize this and appreciate the life you’re living while you’re in the middle of living it. These lines from another Wilder play, The Woman of Andros, express that dilemma: “…we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to live every moment…” Some spiritual traditions focus on mindfulness, an awareness of the present moment, which I think is the same thing as keeping our hearts “conscious of our treasure” and a wonderful goal. However, it’s true that it’s very difficult to live that way every moment. I guess all we can do is keep trying.
