Arthur Miller died today.
Sometimes I think about others around me, friends my age, who seem much wiser than their years. I think about wisdom, and how it’s a partially a product of experience, and how some people seem to have had many more experiences crammed into the same number of years as my own age, giving rise to more opportunities from which to learn than I’ve been privy to. I wonder if somehow they’re endowed with a greater ability to experience life, they’re more innately awake, aware, alive than the rest of us.
But then I realize that time moves at the same speed for everyone. We all have the same capacity for accumulating experiences and memories that help make us who we are. I think that even if we’ve not had the same number of noteworthy experiences, every waking hour we’re absorbing our environment, if not with our conscious mind, certainly with our subconscious, so the sum total of our accumulated sensory information, both conscious and subconscious, must be the same for a given age. And granted, depending on our personality and disposition, we may respond more strongly to a smell, or a sight, or a certain touch, but the volume of information that we’ve stored through time is the same.
What does this mean? Not much. I’m just fascinated by how our subconscious and conscious minds interrelate and how the smallest things will sometimes trigger a wave of emotion because they reach around our conscious mind and tap into what’s below, behind, beneath… It’s why we respond the way we do to a piece of artwork or a poem or a conversation or a song that may not be beautiful in the conventional sense, but that touches a nerve in the more voluminous part of our mind, the subconscious. It’s my paradigm for explaining what moves creative expression from good to great–the fact that I can’t get my rational, conscious mind around it, but that I do respond to it in a deep, resonating way. There’s so much more…
That’s sad. He did a lot of good plays. I didn’t care for “Death of a Salesman”, but I really enjoyed the “Crucible.” We lost a great playwrite.
I like your icon. And you’re right; he was very outstanding.
Agreed. I was definitely saddened by the news. Did you ever seen the movie version of The Crucible? He wrote the screenplay for the adaptation, so it loses much less in translation to the big screen than most plays do.
Thx!
Yes I did. They made us watch in high school of course. I didn’t like it either. What I pictured the play as I was reading it was a lot better then how I saw it. I have never been much for liking movies based off books and plays. They really do lose a lot because they feel they have enough time to squeeze everything in. So, they lose a lot of detail and sometimes what makes the plays what they are.
Really? I enjoyed reading the play, but the movie for me was a powerhouse adaptation of the play’s themes. The casting of Daniel Day-Lewis had a lot to do with how the movie came across too, since he’s really good in those passionate roles.
very true. I fell asleep during the movie. But when we read it out loud it just was a lot more interesting.