Time & the Longing for Eternity

The Violent Bear It Away. By Flannery O’Connor.

It’s too bad that Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) is regarded generally as little more than a sentimental piece of Americana. The milkman, the strawberry phosphates, choir practice, Wally’s stamp collection, Emily and George’s wedding — these quaint elements of the play are merely the shadows through which we find the painful longing for the divine in and through the movements of the ordinary. As the stage manager simplistically summarizes at the beginning of Act 3, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”

Underneath its sweet exterior, the play holds a brutal reckoning: a reminder that this world is not our home, and that time itself holds no remedies. Emily tries to find solace in time. Rather than confronting the mystery of eternity, after her death she prefers to return to her 12th birthday. She realizes quickly, though, how blind people are, how easily distracted from the full realization of life.

Unfortunately, time has that sedative effect on people. In truth, time is a glorious stained-glass window, meant to be seen in its entirety, not in its fragments; however, something broken in our nature — let’s call it Original Sin — has shattered our vision so that we see only the isolated shards of glass lying at our feet here and now, and rarely the entirety of the window. In a gentle, grandfatherly way, Wilder tries to readjust our vision to the parameters of eternity, rather than to the broken fragments of time.

Around the same time period in American literary history, a little Southern woman came along and said: Thornton, these people are too set in their ways. The gentlest thing you can do is smack them in the face. Accordingly, that’s what Flannery O’Connor did.