A few years ago I was the last overnight visitor to a house that’d been in my family for a few hundred years… my relatives were born and died in those old beds, rooms. In the attic were trunks filled with old civil war uniforms, flapper dresses, old lace….. and the old house was rotting, sad… but I could still feel all the life that had happened there, when the world was a very different place. My aunt gave me many of the oil studies that my namesake, Katherine, painted in the 1880s; she also played the guitar, and died at my age, of T.B. I have her tambourine, her ornamental hair comb. I was the twelfth bride to wear the family dress, fifth generation. I love the funny old things I have from that house more than anything, they connect me to a past I was never part of, but is in my DNA, somewhere. It is so bitter, the reminder of mortality, of Time moving on… but comforting because I can lean against those who came before me.
“With used furniture you cannot be emotional”—says Gregory Solomon a couple of times in The Price. The research of time lost, made famous by Marcel Proust, is, in fact, a completely emotion-driven affair. The objects and places of our past can encapsulate indelible moments, a mixture of pain and comfort, joy, continuity, endings, a sense of who we are today. The objects and places of our memories have a life of their own. We can be confronted with them materially—having to look at them again, deal with them, think about their future destination, or they simply live in our minds. But they are there. After all, “lives are lived through china dogs or well-thumbed books, families held together by a letter or a pipe, identities formed though pasts not forgotten.” (Material Things and Cultural Meanings: Notes on the Study of Early American Material Culture by Ann Smart Martin)
We’ve asked cast members of The Price, as well as members of the Long Wharf family, to share their memories of an object or place that speaks volumes (or just a nuance) about who they are today. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post their responses to rumen (Click on the Memory in Objects category for the full listing to date)…
Thanks to Literary for tracking this one down…
For all the public drama of Arthur Miller’s career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.
by Suzanna Andrews September 2007
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