Out of Ease Comes Angst and Out of Adversity, Hope

“Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” I was reminded of this quote from William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” after having a number of students feign a fashionable disdain for optimism.

“Life is meaningless,” one student confidently told me during a class discussion. Another stated with bravado, “Yeah, life stinks.”

Later that same day, a young woman handed me her collection of verses titled “Ten Depressing Poems,” a virtual hymn to doom and gloom. To me, these dire declarations are evidence of our current prosperity; only those resting in relative ease can afford such angst.

In the summer of my 16th year, I stayed with my grandmother in her small San Francisco apartment. Most nights, we stayed up to watch the late show with our customary cup of espresso and biscotti. This particular night, the local station was showing Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.” My grandmother loved those old MGM musicals. I, on the other hand, disdained them, pronouncing them phony. I wanted to see movies that told it “like it really is.” Of course, I was fully convinced that at 16 I was a competent judge of what was real.

My grandmother, who like millions of immigrants had left the poverty of Europe to end up in the slums of America, who had seen her parents grow old working in factories, who as a child had felt her earrings ripped from her pierced ears because she was a “dirty dago,” who had lived through the Great Depression, polio epidemics, World War II, the Korean War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and more personal heartaches then I can list, simply responded to my demand for cinema verite with, “Oh, please!”

Apparently, she didn’t need Hollywood to supply her with “reality”--she had lived it. And in the living of it, she had learned the truths reflected in those bigger-than-life musicals: namely, the art of singing in the rain, of surviving life’s storms with your hope still intact.

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At 16, I didn’t appreciate the courage of my grandmother’s generation to stubbornly hold on to their Technicolor dreams, dreams that my students’ generation only now is poised to realize.

For my grandparents, America was the promised land. Although they struggled enormously against economic and social oppression, they never lost their hope that they were truly building a better future for their family, a future my daughter now enjoys.

To those who say life stinks, I offer these words from George Bernard Shaw:

“This is the joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”