To the Main Road– At West End Gallery
Benteen: “I remember the Earth. I remember it as a place, a place of color. I remember, Jo-Jo, that in the autumn … the leaves changed, turned different colors: red, orange, gold. I remember streams of water that flowed down hillsides, and the water was sparkling and clear. I remember clouds in the sky: white, billowy things that floated like ships, like sails. You see, in ancient times that’s the way men moved their ships across the water. They unfurled large sections of canvas against the wind, and the wind moved them. And I remember night skies. Night skies. Like endless black velvet, with stars, sometimes a moon, hung as if suspended by wires, lit from inside.”
Jo-Jo: “What’s night, Captain?”
Benteen: “Night? Night is a quiet time, Jo-Jo, when the Earth went to sleep. Kind of like a cover that it pulled over itself. Not like here, where we have the two suns always shining, always burning. It was darkness, Jo-Jo, darkness that felt like … like a cool hand just brushed past tired eyes. And there was snow on the winter nights. Gossamer stuff. It floated down and covered the Earth, made it all white, cool. And in the mornings we could go out and build a snowman, see our breath in the air. And it was good then. It was right.”
Jo-Jo: “Captain, why did you leave there?”
Benteen: “Well, we thought we could find another place like Earth, but with different beauties, Jo-Jo. And we found this place. We thought we could escape war, we thought we could — well, we thought that we could build an even better place. And it took us thirty years to find out that we left our home a billion miles away to be only visitors here, transients, ’cause you can’t put down roots in this ground. But it was too late. So we spent thirty years watching a clock and a calendar.”
— Rod Serling, Twilight Zone episode, On Thursday We Leave for Home
This is a scene from a Twilight Zone episode about a group of people who have left the Earth and settled on a distant planet, V-9 Gamma. It is a harsh and barren place with two suns giving it an unending day on which the group has struggled to survive for thirty years. Some have only vague memories of Earth while children who have been born on the alien planet have no memory at all. James Whitmore plays the leader, Benteen, of the group who also tries to keep up their spirit.
I don’t know why I am sharing this today. Maybe it’s just a wonderful example of the lyricism of Rod Serling‘s writing. That would be enough in itself.
But maybe it has to do with the episode’s theme of opting for a radically different existence and leaving all that you know behind. We often don’t recognize the actual ramifications of such a decision until it is too late. We learn in that moment what has been lost. The absence of those lost things we all too often overlooked and took for granted weighs heavily on us.
What we may lose may never be regained. Those things lost turn out to be the things that enrich and define us as humans. What we think would be a better life ends up feeling like an alien existence with us longing for a way of being we have forever lost.
Hmm…
Redtree Times 