Dec. 27th, 2012

I recently read something in the Citizen about why some people are so obsessed with the end of the world: simply put, they can't imagine the world without themselves in it - and since we're all mortal, it follows that the world must be too.

In that hardy perennial of a movie, It's a Wonderful Life, hero George Bailey, coming perilously close to suicide, gets to see what the world of Bedford Falls would have been like if he'd never been born. The conclusion I think we are supposed to draw (since, like most popular holiday-themed movies, it has a happy ending) is that it very nearly WOULD have been the end of the world (certainly the world as Bedford Fallsians knew it) if George Bailey hadn't come into it.

I also just finished reading Eleanor Brown's book, The Weird Sisters. It concerns three sisters in their twenties and thirties whose father is or was a professor of English specializing in Shakespeare. The girls have had a rather unconventional upbringing, speaking to each other in Shakespearean quotes and iambic pentameter. Naturally they are all named after Shakespearean heroines: Rosalind ("Rose"), Bianca ("Bean") and Cordelia ("Cordy"). The action of the story (written quirkily in the first person plural) occurs when all three women return to the family homestead to help with their mother, who is undergoing cancer treatment. The book has a lot to say about what constitutes childhood and adulthood, as well as about family dynamics and birth order and how they affect us - not to mention being a kind of one-volume Coles notes to a slew of Shakespeare plays! Towards the end, Cordy unburdens herself in a conversation with a clergyman, whereupon the clergyman says something like this: yes, but what you've told me is your SISTERS' story, not yours - it's time to stop defining yourself in terms of them. We can't change our past, but we can change the way we talk about it and the specific stories we tell and thereby we can change the future.

Do you ever speculate as to what the world - or at least YOUR world as you know it today - would be like if you had never been born? Clarence Oddbody, the charmingly inept angel in It's a Wonderful Life, points out that each life touches the lives of so many others in its orbit. Of course, not everyone has saved a sibling from drowning, prevented a pharmacist from putting poison in the pills because he was preoccupied about the death of his son, not to mention saving an ailing Savings and Loan company because he put human, emotional and social capital ahead of the financial sort. But most of us want to feel that at least in some small way, we are making a difference in the world and that we will leave some sort of a legacy.

Like a lot of people, I have some descendants: one daughter, two grandchildren. If I'd never been born, of course, they wouldn't have been either. And that's certainly difficult for me to wrap my mere-mortal mind around. But other than them, I'm not sure I can think of anything I've brought about that has been particularly unique or remarkable. Yes, I've probably had a positive impact on a few other people aside from immediate family and friends - through my career, through the things I've written or the causes I've donated time or money to, but has it been an impact that no one else could equally well have had? Probably not. And I'm sure I've had a negative impact on some folks as well!

In my idealistic youth, I might have found that a depressing thought. Now I'm fine with the idea that life doesn't always have to "mean" something; it's not one long string of highs and lows; it just IS - until it isn't.
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