Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
I read a poem by Ezra Pound recently. A poem in which he remarks upon a woman walking in Kensington Gardens. Kensington Gardens! Good Lord, that's where I grew up! I thought about where he could have been when he saw the woman, which path he walked, and it occurred to me that there is no path in Kensington Gardens that he could have walked on that I have not traversed. I know every inch of that place.
We're often caught up in retracing the steps taken in the past. We go on tours, walks. We're shown rooms, furniture. A middle-aged woman waves her hand towards Shakespeare's desk, a plaque on the wall reads Winston Churchill lived in a house on this site, an aging bellhop raises a trembling hand towards us and intones Bob Dylan was born here. We love this stuff.
But I didn't know about Pound being in my park. No one had ever told me. On top of that, I'm not even all that crazy about Pound.
Then a thought struck me. Maybe I'm thinking about this backwards. Perhaps, what was interesting about the Pound poem is not that I too have been where he was, but that he had been where I was going to be. Maybe Pound thought about this. About whose steps he was preempting. That might sound superior, but I'm not talking about oneupmanship. I'm talking about an awareness of those who are going to follow us.
You might ask What difference would it have made to your life if you had never read the Pound poem, and the answer would be: none. Not a spot of difference. That might be why many of us wander through life not being particularly interested in what happened before, or how the objects around us came to be the way they are. It doesn't make my life any better or worse knowing that Pound sat in my park. That he and I could have sat on the same bench. I'm no richer for that. I just like the park.
But in another way, it makes every difference. Just as we all know that the computer has been developed from a cumbersome machine into a highly sophisticated one, it serves us well to consider the same development in what it is to be human: that there were people before us, who we may be completely unaware of, who have greatly contributed toward who we are today.
Personally, I find it consoling to know this. I appreciate the link. I enjoy thinking that there is a thread that runs through the human story. That everything that has happened to me has happened before. Despite the concept of my own uniqueness, there are those who have stood where I stand, both physically and metaphorically. No matter what hardship or pain I endure, there are those who have gone through it before, those who have felt the same way, whether their story is writ large, or whether it has been completely erased by time. Sometimes I find their works, and they feel so close to my own experience of being alive that the idea that there isn't a connection between us seems almost impossible. Don't believe me? I recently read the words of a woman long dead, who wrote: "I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you it shall be with a knife."
I am not alone.