Dancing on a Midsummer Night 1935

I was looking through a gridbook and found this review of the 1935 film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" written by myself as a sentimental 21 year old college student. I find it even more interesting as a man with a job and family who will turn 31 tomorrow:

Old Film can be dangerous. It undermines the illusion that the present is eternal. We will not always overflow with vitality, strength, and beauty. Tonight we watched the 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream. It was breathtaking. What affected me most were the long dance scenes of the fairies and goblins. The dance was beautiful and stunning. It embodied life and death, magic and love, passion and sadness, sexuality and strength. It made me want to rise and dance around campus.

But that dance was not tonight, it was 65 years ago. All the dancers (even the children) are either broken with age or long dead and decaying. Film gives us something entirely different from a live performance. A live dance lets us become lost in the furious passions of this moment. In this moment I feel bold and strong, and the women in my life are as beautiful and graceful as the dancers.

Seeing a dance from 1935 doesn't allow such thoughtless joys. We must celebrate with those long dead. We cannot help but see this spellbinding pathos of the dance within the context of time. This forces us the acknowledge that even our own nights of dancing out the youthful life that pulses in our veins will end. We too grow old and die. We are aging even as we dance.

Film lets us partake in these mad revelries with past generations, but it caries with it a sad taste of mortality. As T.S. Eliot declared, “The dancers are all gone under the hill.” The dance may be eternal but the dancers are not.




Unfortunately the first video I posted was deleted. This is another section of the film.

Ortona Italy

One year ago today my wife and I were walking the streets of Ortona Italy, the town on the other side of the world where my grandfather Eduardo Pantaloni grew up. Then we hadn't even yet conceived of the little boy (Eduardo's great-grandson) who I hold in my lap as I write now.

I think of Eduardo (who changed his name to Edward when he immigrated) growing up in Ortona and my little son growing here in my lap. Eduardo died on Christmas day when I was only a little boy. One of my strongest memories is of him telling me about the beautiful farms in the seaside village were he grew up, only a few days before he died.

He has been dead for decades now, and no one in his home town remembers his name. He is even a distant memory to me. It makes me realize that even though I am 30 now I will also someday be gone and forgotten even in the places that were once my home.

This makes me glad that I am a father. My son may not know it now but his great-grandparents who will only exist in his mind as black and white photos have left themselves in my wife and me, and thus their lives project into his own. Similarly I will leave myself in him.

Changing Decades

Reflections from my journal. The two pictures are ten years apart.

I turn 30 tomorrow. While I am certainly not old yet, I am no longer young. I know that it sounds odd, but this change of decades has caught me by surprise. I didn't really see myself as older, in fact my idea of myself hasn't changed much in the last decade. While the decade from ten to twenty contains necessary change from child to adult, this next decade was more like the simple passage of days that suddenly added up to another decade without being aware of aging. While I have certainly had new experiences and learned new things, I am psychologically, physically, and mentally not very different from that twenty year old—not enough to feel ten years older. This combined with the rapid gestation of our first child, and my first real job as an independent MD, has created a sense of suddenly finding myself much older.

Perhaps it is due to a culture that glorifies youth and fears aging, but I had really grown attached to my idea of myself as a “young man.” Being a young adult allows one to be idealistic, hold strange ideas, and act eccentrically, write fiction, and wear worn and torn clothes—all acceptable and expected in young men, but a bit silly for a grown man. And what is one to do about this surprising loss of youth? Nothing is more pitiful than an adult who tries to seem young by dressing or talking like young people. I must accept that I am no longer young and attempt aging with grace—realizing that 40, 50, 60, etc. will likely overtake me with similar stealth.

These sorts of thoughts make me question how I have used my time. While based on average life expectancies I still have over half my life ahead of me and I am hopefully still far from the stage of unavoidable physical and mental decline, I have passed the freest of decades now. As a father and practicing physician much of my time from now will not be my own.

Myself as a twenty-year-old would have expected to do more over this decade. I would have expected at this point to have done more to make the world better, to have written some important book, and to have a deeper relationship with God. Instead I find myself with a job, a mortgage, accumulating things I don't need, thinking more about my own desires and comfort than about what is right and true.

There is good reason to stop and reflect at thirty. Too often ideals and hopes fade as we age. The Baby Boomers were right to not trust anyone over thirty—look how sold out and self-absorbed they became as they aged! Aging is inevitable as long as life goes on. I can only hope that the apathy, atrophy, and closed-mindedness won't be necessary side effects of becoming older.

Places forget people

Places have a way of forgetting people.

As of today the place we have called “our home” now belongs to someone else. Place we inhabit become a subconscious part of our identity.

Places, however, have no memory. This house will not remember Joy and me or the happy years we spent here. To the people who bought 310 Union St it is just an empty space for them to use, just as it was for us when we moved in. As I was cleaning the basement I came across old writing in cement:

“DEC. 5, 1977 LAURA

I had seen the scrawled letters before, but as I am packed to leave I became curious about this person who had lived in my home, writing her name in the drying cement almost 30 years ago –just a few weeks before I was born. I wonder where Laura is now, or even if she is still living. Had she been a girl she would still likely be in her 40's now. If she was an adult at the time she could be quite elderly now. I wonder how her life turned out. I wonder if she remembers scrawling her name in wet concrete of this basement three decades ago?

The impersonal nature of the world always feels cruel to relational creatures such as ourselves. We want the physical world to remember us, to hold some evidence of our lives. Perhaps this relational nature even more than superstition makes us imagine ghosts of people who lived in our spaces long ago still inhabit them. This is the reason we leave monuments bearing our names throughout the world? Of course, none of this matters. People in the future will look back on our names as dull and empty symbols.

No object or place can maintain a relationship. We all eventually move on. A few hundred years from now and no one will know that any of us ever existed. Those who are remembered only can only hope to become lifeless notes in historical records –a historical figure: the exact opposite of a person, who lives, and loves, and hopes. Even still we hold on tightly...

I marked on the pavement beside Laura's inscription:

“JOHN & JOY: 2004-2007”

The Passage of Time

I recently attended my 10 year highschool reunion. Reflecting on how quickly the last decade vanished, prompted me to find this piece in one of my old gridbooks:

You start out a little kid for whom the world is an unfamiliar place, but after a while you get used to the world and even start to recognize it as your own. Change doesn't affect you at first. The old man who lived on the corner died and a year later someone tore down his house and put a gas station there. But that doesn't mean much to you. A thousand other unremarkable things change without causing any stir at all... until one day you wake up startled to realize that everything you once recognized is gone. It all left without you noticing.

Suddenly you recall that childhood fear of a world you don't recognize. You probably never gave the old man waving from his rocking chair on his porch more than a minute's thought in your whole life, but now you lie awake at night longing for him. And it's no use learning the new world, because you realize that things change too fast now.

The world hadn't seemed to change much at all until you start trying to hold on to things, then the more desperately you cling the faster everything you know flies away. It might be better just to stop worrying. Anyway you'll be gone soon too and your place will probably be replaced with a gas station.