I came to the marathon production of “The Coast of Utopia” at Lincoln Center prepared for a lot of things. I came prepared to walk out of nine hours of theater hungry, nursing soar hamstrings, and with a bad case of indigestion from the two short meal breaks during which I’d shove slices of pizza down my throat while simultaneously digesting three hours of Russian-flavored philosophy that had just been thrown at me. What I did not come prepared for, though, was the fact that, for a moment, I’d step closer than I ever had before to answering that age old, ever-elusive question, “what is the meaning of life?” Not surprisingly to those that know his work, the answer came from the pen of Mr. Tom Stoppard.
In the play, Stoppard’s characters spend years, practically the whole of their lifetimes (and nine hours of their audience’s), trying to peg down the definitions of history’s most famous capitalized nouns: Reason, Freedom, Art, Liberty. How heroic they seem on the stage, these men sacrificing everything for philosophy, unwaveringly shouting their eloquent monologues in the face of exile, tyranny, and death. And what for? These men are not those who need to be freed. They are aristocrats, who could otherwise spend their time doing whatever 19th century aristocrats do. Yet they proceed, with all of their minds and hearts, to search for the key, the answer, the philosophy that will allow them to free all mankind from the shackles of slavery and ignorance. For only then, they argue, can an individual be free. Dang. And here I am, sitting on my couch watching “America’s Next Top Skinny Person” while there’s a genocide going on in Darfur and homeless people are sleeping on the street outside my window. I repeat again, for emphasis, Dang.
Walking out of the Vivian Beaumont amongst my fellow marathoners, I was nagged, nudged even, by two insistent questions: what should I do? How should I live my life? Stoppard’s characters would have me stand up, yell from the depths of my soul, and revolt. Yet, where did all of their efforts, their beautiful monologues, lead the oppressed people on whose behalf they spoke? Their actions did not free anyone from life’s many injustices, and their words survived only to be read by the bourgeois intellectuals of the generations to come. So why did these intelligent, wealthy men spend their lives obsessing over the state of the world, when they knew how little impact they were having? Why didn’t they waste their time away sipping lemonade and reading George Sand? The answer must be that they couldn’t. They had no other option. Inside there burned a fire that necessitated their fight against the status-quo, and this fire was fueled more from a love of words and an obsession with philosophy than from a sense of moral duty. To them, not spending their life philosophizing about freedom and liberty was an impossibility. And they were happy doing it. They were tortured by the questions they asked and the answers that failed to come, but they were in love with this torture and sought it everywhere they went.
My day-long affair with Stoppard’s characters left me wondering, where are our Bakunins and our Turgenevs? What has happened to that drive, that desire to shout from the rooftops? Choice has happened. Freedom has happened. We have gained the freedom that 19th century people dreamed of, but with it has come an overwhelming dose of apathy. It is too easy to not care, to not think, to not explore in this e-country of ours. Freedom means the right to care about what you want to, but as a young member of this planet, I am hard-pressed to accept that freedom means the right to care about nothing. I am well aware of the fact that the world is plagued with a tremendous laundry list of issues. Our individual inefficacy in the face of all the world’s problems, however, should not lead us to a sense of Sisyphean hopelessness. After a week of my own philosophizing, the question I now find myself asking is, what do I care about, what do I feel compelled to stand up in favor of and sacrifice for?
The meaning of life, as inspired by Tom Stoppard, is to be passionate about something. Stand up for something, but not only because you feel a moral or ethical obligation, but because you want to. Because you need to. Because you’re so excited or enraged by something that it makes you act, because doing otherwise would be denying your inner self a chance to thrive, a chance to live. So skip over an article on gun control in the paper in favor of the Garfield comic. And enjoy that Garfield comic, because that is our right, and it is something we must always remember to cherish. But when the time comes when you feel the need to stand up, to speak about something, do it. And do it not out of guilt, but out of love for that world where Reason, Freedom, Art, and Liberty abound.
Absolutely lovely review