The Cocktail Party
Unidentified Guest:As I browsed through the book store at Bangalore airport, Eliot's The Cocktail Party caught my eye. I'd never seen this before, and a love for Eliot's writing brought me to purchase it. A masterfully crafted play, that provides a little of everything - poetry, drama, and a tad of philosophy, as you can perhaps tell in the excerpt above. I definitely recommend the read.
Ah, but we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
Edward:
So you want me to greet my wife as a stranger?
That will not be easy.
Unidentified Guest:
It is very difficult.
But it is perhaps still more difficult
To keep up the pretence that you are not strangers.
The affectionate ghosts: the grandmother,
The lively bachelor uncle at the Christmas party,
Your childhood years in comfort, mirth, security -
If they returned, would it not be embarrassing?
What would you say to them, or they to you
After the first ten minutes? You would find it difficult
To treat them as strangers, but still more difficult
To pretend that you were not strange to each other.
2 comments:
This is really nice. My interpretation of this is that at each meeting with every single person, whether we know them or not, we need to free ourselves from attachment to our set notion of who they have been and remain open to who they are in that moment and who they can be. We need to remain curious. We need to know that people can and do change. Obviously my husband is not a stranger to me, but I should not become so comfortable with my "memory of moments" that I fail to see new truths, that we fail to support one another in growing, or fail to discover new treasures in the other.
Yep, precisely what I interpreted it to be as well. And this, not just for significant others, but for everyone we meet and know.
After all, a child that knows not to sit will be running in no time. We can't hold on to our notions and think that the child will never know to run, once we have seen him/her unable to sit.
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