Goodreads Bookshelf
Latecomers to the Theater
"We live like latecomers to the theatre. We must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events." --Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
I'll probably get around to reviewing this novel at some point, but for now I was searching about for a topic when my mind was otherwise fully occupied by matters I'm not at liberty to blog about, and this quotation that I'd saved presented itself.
Doesn't it just speak to the human condition? We come into the dramas of our parents, our families, our communities, our nations, and our world with no knowledge of what's come before. Who were our parents in their teens or twenties or thirties? Or our grandparents, or aunts and uncles? What was America 10 years before we were born, or even at the moment of our births, much less before that? Yet these conditions have profound influence on what we see around us daily. Some of it we pick up as second-hand semi-truths from others. Many we catch the merest glimpses, while we remain utterly ignorant to others, yet they've shaped everything that makes up our world.
Is that one of our great tasks in life, to figure out what happened on stage before we showed up? How much more necessary is this beyond the metaphor, because we are not simply audience members, but we are called upon to take our place on the stage, whether we've figured out what's going on or not. And so the drama continues....