The Horror of Not Knowing

Hello boys and ghouls! It’s Halloween, and this is… [cue animation of bats flying at you] Sitting in Silence, the creepiest newsletter this side of the allegations against The Diddler. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky, but I can assure you he’s not a Batman villain. At least, I don’t think he is.

These are scary times. After all, there’s also an election coming. I’m not afraid because I’m a person of faith, but it hasn’t escaped my attention that candidates have been referring to whatever the current election is as “the most consequential election of all time” for as long as I’ve been voting. I specifically remember being at an Al Gore rally back in 1999, when a local politician used that phrase. Hyperbole or not, I do believe it’s important to vote, and I encourage you to do so.

Today, I’m thinking about something far scarier than the 539 unread election ads in my inbox. I’m thinking about that eternal valley: The land of unheeded dreams.

And I’m thinking about a cultural product related to another holiday. Christmas and the masterpiece of cinema called It’s a Wonderful Life. For those who have never seen this 78-year-old gem, that title is ironic because the movie is about hating one’s life enough to wish they didn’t exist. The licorice-flavored phrase, “I wish I’d never been born” comes from this movie. At least, I think it does.

The main character, George (played by the original everyman Jimmy Stewart), has failed at life. He never moved away from his Podunk town to find riches in NY. He never amassed fame or power. Nope. He’s just a banker married to a brilliant, gorgeous loving woman named Mary (played to the hilt by Donna Reed) and they have like 15,000 beautiful, sweet kids running around their stately mansion. Ok, their house is a “drafty old” dump, but it has more character than your average suburban Tudor-style situation.

At the risk of spoiling a film older than Hawaii, Alaska, and (checks Wikipedia) Barbie/McDonald’s/Scientology, an angel named Clarence shows up, teleports George to a different part of the multiverse, and proceeds to torture George by showing him how bad everyone’s life would be if George weren’t around to be a good influence. For example: in this alt reality, Mary, tragically, has become *shudders* a librarian. But I love this supremely bizarre film and so do many others.

Why am I thinking about Life today?

Well, Freddie Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Art the Clown are all scary. I won’t deny it. But I find our general failure to recognize the beauty around us far scarier.

George in Life is an archetype. The person who realizes too late (or almost too late) that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. This is the title character in Ivan Ilyich the great novella by Leo Tolstoy. This is Kathleen Turner’s Peggy Sue in Peggy Sue Got Married. It’s the same problem of the protagonist in like a dozen Twilight Zone episodes.

I’ve been on the road a lot these last few years. Just in the past month NY, DC, Mississippi (x2). I may have been in London according to Facebook, but that was probably an alternative reality. Very often, someone will come up to me during a book signing and talk about their regret over not writing or following some other dream they’ve harbored for many years. Sometimes those people have gray hair like me. Sometimes they’re in their 20s and lamenting a decade of missed opportunities. I don’t laugh or look down my nose at any of them. If we really get into it, I tell them that their time is now. That there’s a town full of people who have lived better lives because of their presence. And I say that “we are the music makers/And we are the dreamers of dreams.”

That’s a pretty good place to end today’s post. At least, I think it will be. Be safe and say hi in the comments if you have a second!

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