Friday Five: Looking Back

The most-hyped film of 2013 is due for Australian release next weekend. In the lead-up to Baz Luhrmann’s bombastic take on The Great Gatsby, there has been a general scramble to show appreciation of the jazz age. This includes many folk opining how much they would have liked to have lived in the 1920s, when glamour was de rigueur and showgirls were awash with champagne.

I’ve never really got this ‘born into the wrong era’ thing. For one thing, if you were lucky enough to be a Bright Young Thing in the 1920s, you had a great depression, another World War and the chilling spectre of fascism looming on the horizon. As for fashion, those dresses (not to mention those dances) aren’t at all becoming for larger-chested women. And women (aged 21 and above) did not achieve the right to vote until 1928 in the UK. (The Representation of the People Act of 1918 only enfranchised women over 30 who met minimum property requirements).

Herein lies much of the problem. When people look back longingly at bygone eras and imagine themselves in such times, they are thinking of the rich, the male and the white. Admittedly there is still a long way to go (and many of today’s young women are actually retarding the cause by assuming it is no longer an issue) but there has never been a better time to be a woman than right now in the Western democratic world.

I have the right to vote; to work; to be educated; to be healthy; to live how I want and love whom I want. So when people ask in what decade you would most like to live, I have to say now. Many people seem to like to wallow in nostalgia, and I have recently come across many examples of this, but I will not play that past is better game.

5 Examples of Moribund Nostalgia:

1. The Hollow by Agatha Christie – I recently performed in this play which includes many lines about memory and going back to our roots. “The past is sometimes a very good place to live.”
2. Midnight in Paris – fellow cast members had a discussion about this film, which illustrates in a surprisingly gentle way how even those who live in the so-called halcyon days don’t see them as such as yearn for something else.
3. The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel – a book I was reading at the time of the run, which follows three sets of sisters in London from WWI until ‘now’ and includes this quote:

   “You were meant to get nostalgic for the past once you reached a certain age, but it hadn’t happened. And why would it? The past wasn’t somewhere any right-thinking person would wish to dwell. It contained far too much that you were sad had gone forever, and so much more that was just plain unpleasant. And it got no less unpleasant just because the years had passed. You just felt the pain of it less, that was all.”

4. An article I read in The Word magazine by Rob Fitzpatrick about our attitude to young people’s music, in which he writes,

   “Don’t waste your life trying to steal back the past. But just as importantly, don’t try and trash the future either – because it’s not ours to trash. The people it belongs to don’t care what we think anyway.”

5. “The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there” – the opening line from L.P Hartley’s The Go-Between, and a great quote.

Quick Dectet: Last Lines

Because it is the last day of October and hence the last of my quick quintets, I thought I would choose closing lines from novels for my subject. Opening lines get all the credit, when the credit should really come at the finish. Some of my favourite books don't have great last lines (and the last line of Jane Eyre is not 'And reader, I married him' - that's the first line of the last chapter for all you pedants out there - you know who you are!)

And because there are quite a few to choose from, and it is my blog and I can do whatever I want, I have decided to go for ten things rather than five (in chronolgical order):

Top Ten Last Lines in Literature: 

1. 'Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.' – William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48)
2. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
3. 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
4. 'But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.' – A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928)
5. 'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. – George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
6. 'He loved Big Brother' – George Orwell, 1984 (1948)
7. 'Oh God. You’ve done enough. You’ve robbed me of enough. I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.' – Graham Greene, The End of the the Affair  (1951)
8. 'Are there any questions?' – Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
9. 'I thought they were supposed to be dead, but in real life they’re just going to go on singing.' – Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
10. 'Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.' – Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)