Love In The Time Of The First World War

My first attempt at writing of love. The year is 1917, and silent movies were accompanied by live musicians, in this case a pianist.

Soon houses thinned into farmland and wilderness. Doug turned around, desiring the company and the light the town provided. How long he walked he did not know, not conscious of where he was going but merely trying to stay on whatever road seemed most well-travelled. Here and there were people headed towards their destinations, but Doug did not know what they were. Perhaps they were on their way to visit family and friends, on their way to houses that provided comfort and camaraderie to those who knew the owners.

For the first time in recent memory, Doug felt alone. Whatever the downsides of a lumber camp, there existed within it a certain comradeship. Interdependence required as much. And before that, even though alone, there were other words more apt to describe what he had been feeling. Fear, frustration, despair, but not a longing for human companionship. Perhaps his time in the woods had achieved the desired aim—he was thinking and feeling normal human thoughts and emotions again. Even the events of the last few months had not been able to prevent the healing that had taken place. Whatever might be wrong with the outside world, it did not have to leave its mark on his soul. He was beginning to feel whole again, and feeling whole, he realized that man was not meant to spend all his time alone.

Music drifted into his mind that seemed to accompany his thoughts. Elegant, beautiful music that stirred in him subtle and wonderful emotions. Anonymous longings sprang up in him like long-dormant flora, feelings universal and timeless. Another soul was touching his, telling him of deep mysteries beyond the understanding of man.

Music. It was a language that spoke of things over which words had no power.

Chopin! Tears came to his eyes and he did not know why. It was beauty, beautiful music beautifully played.

He did not realize it but he began to walk towards the source of the music. It was only a piano, but each note reverberated in him. It was another thing entirely than the music he had been used to of late, a fiddle played by oversized hands accompanied by a concertina and doggerel verses.

And just as suddenly the music changed. It was as if at once a chase began, and if to accompany it came a hunting song or a madcap dance. Looking up to the source of the sound he saw a rather large building and upon it read the sign for a moving picture show. He had come upon a theater, albeit a very humble one. A woman sat at a window, distractedly. The show had apparently already started, but Doug was able to get her attention and purchase a ticket. He entered into a small dark room with perhaps no more than fifty chairs arranged in front of a silver screen no more than ten feet across. And upon it played some drama concocted by one of the major studios. But while in other circumstances he might have been interested in the movie, it was the piano that called to him. It was too dark to see the people inside the theater as more than shadows, but he could see the movement of the pianist. It appeared to him a ballet dance, so fluid and lovely was the body as it swayed to the notes. She was positioned to the right of the screen, facing it so that she could respond musically to what was being shown. Every act and emotion upon the screen was played out more convincingly in the movements she made, more so in the music itself.

Doug could not even recall the movie he was watching, only that it was the most moving he had ever seen. Not the story itself nor the actors but the accompaniment. It lifted everything, from the simplest movement to the look of longing on the starlet’s face. Music infused the story, making it sublime.

Sometimes as the light on the screen was brightest, he could make out her fingers touching down gracefully upon the keys and it appeared to him in his enchantment they moved like tiny faeries in an intricate dance.

He did not see her face and yet he was convinced he loved her. Her grace and gentle soul, the playfulness that let drop hints of her depths like ripples on a pond. He was content to sit in the dark, alone with the music she played.

It was over far too soon. The film ended and the lights came on and-lo and behold! She was beautiful. Beautiful as the music she played, lovelier far than the starlet that had been on the screen. Long brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, with here and there a strand escaping like non-conformists. Her entire person seemed to radiate grace, as though you could not feel uncomfortable in her presence.

And yet Doug felt extremely uncomfortable at the moment. He wished to approach her, make her aware of his existence, and yet knew no way of doing so. He was a stranger in a small community and knew such forwardness would be quite unacceptable. He knew of nothing he could do to catch her eye. Already she was surrounded by others from the audience. And yet Doug could not help noticing there was no one who seemed to be either suitor or husband.

She was young, younger than Doug by several years, but seemed in possession of a maturity beyond her age. His eyes slid from her face as she happened to glance in his direction and in that moment he noticed no ring on those fingers that had danced so eloquently on the ivory keys.

She left amid a group of people, family he couldn’t help thinking, judging by a similar look among a few of them. Doug too exited into the darkness, alone but with thoughts of another, one whose name he did not even know. And all the events of the last few months receded in his memory, and all the concerns of the last few years slipped away. He had sought to flee what had been haunting him, the inescapable truths of a world too large for him, and at last he knew what he had been seeking.

Love was the answer. Love was the cure for all the sickness and ugliness in the world. The revelation came not as a thought but as an emotional welling up within him, like the passionate passages of a nocturne.

The Metric System And American Exceptionalism

     Back when I was in grade school, sometime in the 70’s, they decided it would be a good idea to start to teach children the metric system in anticipation that we would soon be switching over to it. We were taught that it was based on common sense and logic rather than on the lengths of the king’s body parts or the quantity of liquid his bladder could hold.

     For example, the meter was 1/10,000,000^th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Pretty neat, right? There would be no arguments about exactly how long some long-dead king’s foot was when we had a constant scientific measurement that would be for all times provable. And then there is the measurement of area. Rather than the acre, which corresponds to I don’t know what, you have the are, which is simply 100 meters squared. And here’s the beauty of this, not only units of distance and area but also volume and mass and temperature are based on the simple meter. Because a liter is simply ten centimeters cubed. And the gram is the weight of the cube of a hundredth of a meter. And best of all, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Genius!

     And tens, everything was broken down into tens. Being young, I found it infinitely easier to learn than having sixteen ounces to a pint, two pints to a quart and four quarts to an American and five quarts to an Imperial Gallon. If that’s right: I’m still not sure how the Imperial Gallon worked.

     But beyond the fact that it was easier, it was universal. People all over the world were using it and it only made sense for the good old U.S. of A. to use it as well. Using an antiquated system of measurements that wasn’t even of our own design was an embarrassment. Even our own scientific community had long been using metric since it was practical when comparing studies in the world.

     So it made sense that we were switching over. We were told that there would be a certain amount of resistance from those who had been doing things differently their whole lives, that was understandable. But the change would take place and we’d all be better off because of it.

     The switch was taking place in Canada at about the same time. I remember one year visiting relatives in Canada and the older ones complaining about it. But when I visited them the next year, everybody was already adjusted to it. Suddenly, instead of measuring the speed limit in miles they were now doing it in kilometers and everybody was okay with that. In the course of a year, Canada joined the rest of the world and acquired a vastly superior system of measurements.

     But we here in the U.S. couldn’t do it. We just didn’t have the will it took to accomplish such a basic task.

     Perhaps it was because of the bicentennial. Right about then we started getting downright patriotic again. And looking around us we realized how well we had done as a nation and how we had everything we needed. And being patriotic and contented is only a short step from being arrogant and demanding. Somehow we got the attitude that we didn’t have to change for nobody, and that the rest of the world could just suck it. If they wanted to sell their goods in America (yeah, I know Canada is in America too, but dammit, we’re AMERICANS), then they would have to measure things in ounces and feet. Of course, other countries were glad to be selling their products and were only slightly put out having to convert things to our system of measurements, as long as our currency was profitably converting.

     Another reason, perhaps, that we could not manage to make the change was that we had an instinctive dislike of someone telling us what to do. We were Americans, and we were nothing if not free. How did we know? Because that’s what had been drilled into our skulls every day on television and in cigarette ads. We didn’t mind being told what to do by advertising, but by golly, we weren’t going to have our government doing it. At some point, we got it into our thoughts that any attempt our government made to gravitate us towards something was just a sinister move towards socialism.

     And so today we are one of the few countries in the world that has a system of measurements different from the rest of the world. Only Myanmar and Liberia now stand with us.

     I write this not to suggest that it is high time America switches to the metric system, although it is, if only to save money for mechanics who have to buy two sets of wrenches. I mention our failure to convert to the metric system as a symptom of a deeper problem. It seems that Americans today cannot come together on ANY problem, no matter how much of a no-brainer it is. We have lost the ability to unite in any kind of cause at all. During the Second World War, patriotism meant having paper drives, tin drives, and victory gardens. We knew that we as Americans, whatever divided us, were united in many ways. We knew that we had built something pretty good and that we would have to occasionally work together in order to preserve our way of life.

     That’s a long way from where we are today. After September 11, 2001, our president did not ask for us to come together to sacrifice for the common good, but instead implored us to continue our daily routine and go shopping. And in the ensuing years, it has only gotten worse. Today, there is no sense of unity, no sense that sometimes the only solution is to pull together and make the necessary—and often vastly preferable—changes that should be made.

     It’s not just our failure to commit to the metric system, which was and is a no brainer. Add to that our inability to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, from inefficient forms of transportation, from an addiction to foreign produced consumer goods that we simply don’t need, and a mass of other problems we have no heart to tackle. We have become frozen, unable to act to confront the problems that can only be confronted as a group. Not as individual consumers, but as a unified front. We have become like the old world that we once mocked for the way they clung to outmoded ideas.

     When I was young and my dad tried to tell me what to do, I always asserted my burgeoning age by telling him experience was the best teacher. His reply was that experience was not the best teacher but the most expensive one. I hope that we as a nation can learn our lesson before harsh reality hits, but if that’s what it takes, at least we will learn a lesson that will hopefully stick.