Alive and Moving

"Somebody crowd me with love, somebody force me to care,
somebody let me come through, I'll always be there,
as frightened as you, to help us survive, being alive!"
-Stephen Sondheim, Being Alive from Company

Maybe this upcoming opera has got me in a really musical mood (as if I'm ever NOT) but as I read E.M. Forester's The Other Side of the Hedge the above song, Being Alive instantly came to mind. Though my details on the plot of the musical are sketchy, it's basically a dramedy about a man named Bobby who has troubles committing to adult relationships and finds himself, on his 35th birthday, confronted with everything in life he tries to avoid. Hilarious and heartbreaking situations follow, and Being Alive is the big closing number. Bobby originally starts the song misanthropic, reflecting his initial sentiments, and finishes with this final verse and chorus realizing the value of everyday life.

It's really quite a beautful song, and The Other Side of the Hedge is a beautiful poem, with connections to the song. Hedge examines the value of life and human existence from a more progressional standpoint, showing the protagonist jogging in the beginning along with many others before finally falling in the hedge. Within, she finds a sect of humanity that does not move but simply stands in place and does nothing. They simply stand around containing great amounts of potential but not using it at all, because that is supposedly the better way to live. Of course, that is not really living at all, and the heroine cries out "Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!" Suddenly, the El Dorado chapters in Candide have new meaning and weight. Suddenly, Candide's escape from the perfect city of peace becomes not a selfish endeavour but the result of a deep and longing desire for something more than just comfort and inactivity. There is no life in El Dorado, true life is outside the hedge! I'm beginning that this distinction between apathy and action, between peace and tribulation, ultimately between stale life and true life is the ground upon which modernity makes its stand, and I look forward to seeing what Bonhoeffer and Faulkner do with this tension.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to comment as you wish. I commented on Josh Goldman's Apparently, the Hedge IS Greener On the Other Side.