Wilder and Chesterton

Our town is a very interesting play. It was the first play my dad was in in high school. He had one line. It was "the stars are sure bright tonight". I always thought that it sounded like a dull, boring play, but I have found that Thorton Wilder, in less than a hundred pages, captures in short instaces the problem of living as immortal creatures in a physical, temporal world. I have two thoughts about this problem. The first has to do with that strange place where aesthetic theory and semiotics meet. My thought, or, more properly, question, is this: if we can take time learning and deriving meaning from art, and if art is, on the whole, the practice of making images of things in reality, then how much more may we learn from taking time with and paying attention to objects in reality?

But I feel like art is most times more intuitively meaningful than reality. Why is this?

Okay, second thought: Chesterton masterfully tackles this problem. At the end of The Man Who Was Thursday (mild spoiler ahead for those who care), Syme encounters the dance of common things, where people are dressed up as lampposts, dogs, mailboxes, etc. He says that long afterward it was the real things that reminded him of the dancing things, not the other way around. An interesting question emerges: can art remind reality what it is, or what it should be? Ahh, but this is a deep, confusing well. Let's return to Chesterton. In ManAlive, Smith suggests that perhaps God gave man a love for specific things both because heaven is a specific place and because eternity is easily the greatest idol. In Our Town, Wilder gives one a glimpse of eternity at the end, shows us the dead's view of the living. But the message is not so much that death shows us the worthlessness of specific things and moments, but that death shows us how much is in specific things and moments that the living miss.

Perhaps we are too concerned wiht the infinite, with a God who is the God of another world, another place, another time. It would be good to remember that God is the God both of heaven and of your sidewalk, that Christ is the Word upon which your hedges depend for existance, and that the Spirit moves and breaths with the sparrows in hiding in the Ficus and in the air that the ceiling fan circulates. A God who is so specific must be a great God indeed.