Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

PROFOUND OR BANAL OR NEITHER?

            I am writing this “Something Thoughtful” for the first posting of the year, after having had a long summer break. So, as you and I are still in a semi-holiday mood, I will make it brief, unchallenging and a little frivolous.

Have you ever noticed how things that are taken to be profound wisdom are, in reality, merely commonplace ideas dressed up a little?

I first thought about this some years go when I had just been watching the (very imperfect and untrue-to-the-book) film version of Richard Hughes’ novel A High Wind in Jamaica. At the end of the film, pirates are put on trial for a crime which, despite their other villainies, they did not in fact commit. When, in spite of their innocence, they are eventually condemned to death, one pirate (Anthony Quinn) says resignedly to the other (James Coburn) “Zac, we must be guilty of something.”

What a fine expression of the Existentialist Absurd as expounded by Sartre and Co., I said. Guilty or innocent, there is something in the nature of things that will get us in the end, regardless of our will. Here is ineluctable fate.

But my wife, much more commonsensical about these things that I often am, said “But isn’t it just like that song in The Sound of Music?” She was referring to the song in the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie where, having just, against her expectations, won the hand in marriage of Captain von Trapp, a romantic Maria sings “Somewhere in my youth and childhood, I must have done something good”.

Same idea, you see. Ineluctable fate having nothing to do with our will.

I was a little deflated that my high-brow reference could be equated with something as middle-brow as The Sound of Music, but I couldn’t deny that my wife was right. It was the same thought in different words.

Here’s a more recent experience I had of the same phenomenon. In his autobiographical trilogy The Paper Nautilus, the anthropologist Michael Jackson quotes these lines from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Sudden Light”, conveying a moment when a woman first falls in love:

“You have been mine before, -

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow’s soar

Your neck turned so,

Some veil did fall, - I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?” (quoted pg. 177)

The poem is actually listed as a “song” in Rossetti’s collection The House of Life and it begins:

“I have been here before

But when or how I cannot tell”

            So here you have the expression of an experience mixing déjà vu with the idea that one is actually destined to fall in love with a particular person. Coming from a canonical poet (well, almost…) it must be profound, mustn’t it?

But is it any more profound that the lyrics of the old Rodgers and Hart song “Where or When” from the 1937 show Babes in Arms? :

“It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I can't remember where or when

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then
But I can't remember where or when

Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again

And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before, and loved before
But who knows where or when?”

Here it is – the same quality of déjà vu, the same sense of inevitable and fated love as in the Rossetti poem. But a high-brow wouldn’t quote Tin Pan alley, would he?

The moral of this tedious, truncated disquisition is a simple one. We often think something is profound simply because of who wrote it or the context in which we found it. Or it could be a matter of sheer style. To quote Alexander Pope’s definition in his An Essay on Criticism:

“True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d:

What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d.”

“Oft thought”? Yes indeed. But not put into particularly lovely words.