There’s an old theatrical rule to the effect that if a gun appears on stage in Act I, by Act III it must be fired. But what if a gun were to go off at the end of a play without being foreshadowed at the beginning? It might be a black mark against the playwright, but it would also make the production a great deal more lifelike.
In real life, guns — events, really — have a way of firing suddenly, frighteningly, and in complete breach of the invisible scripts that we all vaguely think we’re following.
Every time we make an appointment to see the doctor, or book a date for lunch, or buy a plane ticket, we’re briefly projecting ourselves into what seems a predictable future. We assume that our lives will hum along normally, and, in due course, carry us from now to then.
And then the metaphorical gun goes off.
I know a man who thought he had a happy marriage, until his wife left him.
I know a family whose middle-class life is slipping away in the recession’s undertow. It’s taken their jobs, their savings, their expectations for a secure future, and soon it may swallow their home.
I know a frail old man who thought he was dying, and who welcomed it. He said goodbye to the people he loved and prepared to go gently into that good night — and who now finds he is not dead, not even dying, and is filled with gloom at what he fears will be a slow and humiliating decline.
Sometimes it’s impossible to avert our eyes from the hard fact that our plans for agreeable, orderly futures — or, for that matter, risky and adventurous futures — are mostly illusions.
They hang around us like delicate theatrical scrims, painted with whatever we think our reality is and what our expectations might be. One might show green fields and children running, because a man sees himself living in the country someday, with a family. Another might show scenes from far-future old age, as a woman walks along the Potomac arm-in-arm with her husband of 40 years. A third might show a tender deathbed scene, followed by a moving memorial service.
Yet we don’t control other people. We can’t predict events. And it’s a shock when the pretty scrims that surround us are ripped down and pulled away.
In life there are no guarantees. Everyone knows that.
Still, when events are proceeding calmly, from breakfast to lunch to dinner and around again, it’s unbelievably difficult to remember this. And when the air is reeking of gunpowder, and we look around at our altered surroundings, it can be equally difficult to adjust.
The past is prologue, of course, as Shakespeare had it, and there’s some comfort in that. The world is not actually created anew each morning. Yet our scripts are constantly being revised. Anything can happen. Thank heavens that it usually doesn’t.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
