Our Town

Does anyone else sense a contradiction in "Our Town?"  Two days ago we went to Regent University's production of Thornton Wilder's 1938 play.  Well done but no more captivating than when I first saw it.  (I cannot recall the date or place but watching Our Town was (is?) a requisite rite of passage to adulthood in America.)

According to the narrator/stage manager, the shades of the denizens of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire are gradually erasing the desires and even the memories of their embodied lives.  The only desire that ultimately remains among the dead seems to be for a crypto-Buddhist state of eternal happy collective consciousness.  (Why any desire at all remains among the dead is unexplained).  Even the deep grief of the living draws no more than faint scorn from the dead.

Yet, when the recently deceased Emily returns as a visitor to the embodied world to view the day of her fourteenth birthday, she quickly flees back to the company of her fellow wraiths.  Only now after she is dead does she see how the living fail to appreciate the intensity of human life.  (Frankly, Emily's shock at what she saw of life 15 years earlier seemed contrived.  I wouldn't have know why she fled what she saw unless she had told us.  I don't know if that's due to poor writing or a flaw in this production.)  In Emily, in any event, Wilder condemns the superficial, harried nature of modern life.

But why, I wonder, should the living care about life?  If life shortly ends in death and death means the gradual loss of desire, why should any of us stop to appreciate the beauty of the world or the deep and mysterious wonder implicit human relationship?  Why not stop desiring even while alive?

Perhaps Wilder intended this conflict of worldviews to get us thinking.  Or, perhaps he simply wanted to hit all the bases.  Celebrating appreciation of the quidities of human life is a much easier sell than nirvana.