Have you heard this one? According to the latest viral internet challenge, men are revealing a preoccupation with Ancient Rome. It turns out, a lot of men think about Ancient Rome - like, on the daily, as the kids say. (I think). This has led many of us to ask ourselves, what is our Ancient Rome? According to a New York Times Article, that could be everything from ex-best friends or Princess Diana to that lip sync of Tom Holland’s to America’s cultural inferiority complex.
I’ve heard that only 5% of our thoughts each day are new thoughts. If that’s true, then it’s fair to say that we all have our own preoccupations. A fun game is to organize those preoccupations into running themes. Once I’ve brought a theme to the front of my brain, it’s fun to see where they turn up.
You know how when you learn a new word, suddenly you hear it everywhere? Or when you decide you want a mattress and then facebook knows without knowing and starts sending you targeted ads? Yeah, like that.
Here’s where my current preoccupation/theme begins:
This summer, I was resting happily on a pontoon boat with my old friend, let’s call him, The Philosopher. He was, before my friend married or even fancied him, the kind of guy who would go out for a beer and riddle us with philosophical “exercises” I think he called them. It had been awhile since he’d set one up for me and since I’m oh so much smarter now, I was delighted to listen to this newest of exercises.
Man, he’s going to be so annoyed if I totally butcher it, so I’m going to copy and paste a brief summary of the resulting discussion that took place a week or so later (after he ruined my boat trip by putting ideas in my head). He said:
How do you decide what to do, when what you decide to do will affect what you come to think you ought to have done?
And let me tell you, this is just the kind of word salad that I can digest for days. It became a theme. Ok, a preoccupation. I saw it everywhere. And if Frank Sinatra can eat it up and spit out, so can I.
Here’s what I’m spittin’: making a decision is difficult, considering the fact that the decision itself leads us to new values. If we make a different decision, we may come to value different things. So how can you know what’s to come?
In other words, to quote the Disney film version of Pocahontas, (and I beg The Philosopher’s forgiveness for doing so):
What I love most about rivers is, you can’t step in the same river twice. The water’s always changing, always flowing…. And never dream that something might be coming Just Around the RiverBend!
I don’t want to marry Ko-ko-um, and I’m not contemplating if all my dreaming’s at an end. I’m just saying… Who knows what’s around the bend? Who can see around a corner?
No one. That’s who. It’s all an educated guess. Philosophers and physicists and babies agree that you can’t see around a corner. It’s just physics… and a current lack of x-ray vision, which my 6 year old and I assume, Elon Musk, is hard at work acquiring.
Corners scare me. The unknown is tricky. And I’m very jumpy. I used to jump at a paper cutout of Dumbledore that stood just around the (river) bend of the first flight of stairs where I worked. Every single day. I never seem to be looking that far ahead.
I should have matured enough to know by now that something is indeed, around the bend. However, anticipating disasters is not the answer. Every day there is some news, locally or even in my own family that prompts the morbid question, am I next? But you can’t - you just can’t go there. Sometimes it’s good just to stay in your own hallway, only slightly aware that the corners exist at all.
But what if I turn a corner and I can see what’s there - and I’d rather I hadn’t gone that route? Why can’t I go back and choose again? Is there time? OR will the choice change my values so that I like it just fine anyway?
Most people would say that they’d make the same choices again, but I’m not so sure. I think that once you know, you’d surely try to tweak something somewhere. I’ve always ruminated on the unfairness of only getting to know one life and one life’s decision.
I remember going abroad for the first time. Here I was, a Junior in high school, looking out from the Eiffel Tower at night, seeing all the lights in all the houses, and just feeling like there was just no way of knowing each of those places and what led each person to those places. It seemed a lot to not know. All those lives! All those choices! It seemed, again, unfair.
I found a poem by Lewis Meyers that says it better. Here’s an excerpt:
Another Room The thing about space in paintings is you can't step into it... Particularly that whiplash limit sends you reeling in Pieter de Hooch's paintings where the door is always open to another room, another chance in life, but you can't go through that door...
Now that I have that image in my head, I’m going to find it three dimensionally infuriating! Who would do that to someone? DeHooch, you crazy bastard. Was it to prove that you could do linear perspective on a flat surface? Was that all? Did you get excited thinking about creating depth out of nothing? Or were you thinking of the audience’s imagination, and trying to make us crazy?
My dreams even deHooch me sometimes. I get to places or to the end of riddles, deep in a dream, that I can’t understand and I wake myself in frustration saying, “Damnit, this is MY brain, and if MY brain doesn’t know what’s back there, I’m never going to know.”
(Watch out, this is where I start comparing myself to Scarlett O’Hara.)
In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara keeps dreaming of this fog that she’s running through, but she doesn’t know what’s on the other side of it. Finally when she realizes it’s been Rhett all along, he says the classic line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and walks right back out into that very fog to a future we know not of. Maddening!
Damn you ambiguous endings! Damn every movie Paul Newman ever made! Damn the fog that blocks Gatsby’s view of the Green Light.
But of course, that’s what books are for, and movies too. And for this chance to be led into an ambiguous fog or into a very clear Truth, we will subscribe to 32 different platforms - from Kindle to the Library App to the latest channel we used to watch that we now have to pay for, to traditional Cinema. We used to spend an hour every friday night at Blockbuster. Beta, VHS, DVD, LAserDisc, blu-ray, just show me another world!
Of course the same has always been the case for Theatre, which is what makes it so alluring. That there is, right there, behind the drama, a backstage, masked by curtains so that people can guard “an illusion” is so absolutely silly if you think about it. How have we held on to that magic since 500 B.C.? How do we watch a story, knowing that behind the story, just offstage, someone is tearing off their mask and complaining about their bodily functions?
When things are going oh so right, or oh so wrong, why can’t we see, suddenly out of the corner of our eyes, an emerald curtain and just open it?
I watch my own kids experience this - this world opening, but with oh so many corners. Yes, you can do this, but not that. Why? Because I know something you don’t! I’ve turned that corner before.
My son, for example, is in the first grade and is trying to spread his wings. I am no longer to wait for him by the school door, for example, but instead, stay in my car so that he can walk along the sidewalk and find me himself, open the door himself and buckle himself up. He has also asked to walk home alone, which I would be all for IF he didn’t have to cross a four lane highway and IF I hadn’t already witnessed him attempt the walk with our neighbors. That day, I came home from work only to find them dragging him home in their wagon while their 3 year old walked - and they weren’t even halfway home.
He is also refusing to ride his bike unless he can ride it alone, despite the fact that he is newly without training wheels and we live in a neighborhood which requires an uphill climb no matter which direction you go.
The other day he begged me to go out on his bike, but by himself. I told him he could go by himself down to the corner of our street, to his friend Charlotte’s house. His eyes lit up. Apparently I had said Charley’s house, (not Charlotte’s) which is a problem because Charley is his cousin who lives on the other side of town.
He went down the street, and instead of stopping, went round the corner. Luckily, his dad was just coming home from work and found him at the bottom of the street, standing by his bike, looking for his cousin’s house. The poor boy pleaded with his dad, telling him, “Mom TOLD me I could go to Charley’s!”
He was pointing in the wrong direction pleading, “But, I know the way!”
I knew exactly what he was thinking.
Flashback one: (My earliest memory) I’m in my backyard, believing wholeheartedly that if I could just get over the fence, I would be in Fantasyland - a small, 80s amusement park. I’ve seen pictures, so I must have been there at some point.
Flashback Two: I’m 8? I attempt to roller skate to a friend’s house only to realize I’m going to die going down the hill from our house and then die climbing back up.
(It must be utopia to grow up somewhere exotic and flat like Indiana.)
It HURT being proven wrong. Worse, it was embarrassing. My heart breaks for this boy who thinks he’s almost ready to do anything. At this age or that, you want to go in directions your brain doesn’t really even understand. Down the street, yes, but around the corners too.
And then there’s my 16 year old who is learning to drive and for whom the moment will soon come when she can take a car and go in any direction she chooses. She’ll have to go right or left, or slower or faster. I told her recently, in a high pitch, while I clutched the door, “you just have to pick a lane!”
Making the confident choice, might be the real lesson.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” - Henry David Thoreau
I was listening to a podcast the other day about a woman whose mother was always RIGHT, and who never waivered in her self-confident choices. What the daughter realized was that her mother was making decisions FIRST and THEN deciding, after the fact, that they were the best things.
We could all use a little of that attitude - some forgiveness of ourselves for choices made. We can’t know what we’ll come to value later in life. Like the Philosopher said, “What you value will change and it will change depending, in part, on what you choose to do.”
It’s like no matter what, you’ll find yourself singing “Memories, like the CORNERS, of my mind.”
Well, if they must be misty and water-colored, may it at least be the laughter you remember, whenever you remember…
Until next time…
Click on the photo of Gladys Knight and the Pips for their version of The Way We Were/Try to Remember.
I appreciate very much how you tackle profound things with simple but beautiful language.
Wow! Now I can't stop thinking! But, admittedly, my mind does work in a similar fashion! How boring if it wouldn't!