Waiting in the checkout lane at a supermarket, I glance at
the magazines with their photos of glamorous celebrities. Or worse, photos of
celebrities the paparazzi have caught drunk or obese. Who are all these people,
and why should anyone care about them?
Long ago, I cared. Back in the 1950s I knew all the movie
stars who were in Photoplay and other
magazines. The term au courant
was not yet in my vocabulary, but the idea was already entrenched. Most
teenagers knew that June Allyson had a dusty pink bedroom and was married to
Dick Powell, had a crush on Stewart Granger after seeing King
Solomon’s Mines, and looked enviously at
Jeanne Crain’s pencil sketches. No detail about the stars was unimportant to us
high school girls.
For an impressionable young girl living far from city
lights, fascination with celebrities is understandable. But, that was long ago,
and in college I was exposed to live theater, classical music, and philosophy.
The world suddenly seemed much larger and better than it had looked in glossy
magazines.
Old people are often urged to “think young,” to “keep up
with the times,” and so on. Isn’t it better for us to provide a link to the
past? We have a perspective that is impossible for the young. My mother, who
was born in 1908, forecast the current recession years ago, because she saw the
similarities to the Roaring Twenties and to the Depression. I remember World
War II and the postwar years, and can contrast that time with the present.
From our own aging viewpoint, we may be happier and more
fulfilled if we spend time with the important books and music of the past than
if we try to understand current ones. I would rather read a novel by Austen or
Dickens than by most modern writers, rather listen to Tchaikovsky or Gershwin than
to Philip Glass. Some modem writers and composers are excellent, of course; I
enjoy reading anything by Simon Winchester, and am captivated by Animusic. In the end, however, I go back to old favorites.
Most of all, though, I want to catch up with important
things that have been postponed too long, especially regarding our natural
environment. Just in the past few years, for instance, I have begun truly
experiencing the national parks and realizing their importance. About 100 years
ago the poet A.E. Housman wrote that “And since to look at things in bloom,
Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go, To see the cherry
hung with snow.” I have far fewer than 50 springs remaining, but will make the
most of them.
