Paths

There’s a scene from Federico Fellini's (underrated in my opinion) Italian film, La Dolce Vita—"The Sweet Life"—in which the restless reporter Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is called to the home of his new friend Steiner. To Marcello, Steiner represents and offers an admirable life of intellectual pursuit away from the insane and immoral world chased by Marcello and other members of the paparazzi. The reason for being called to Steiner’s home is not admirable, though. The man has killed himself and his two children whom he had kissed goodnight in the same bed in a previous scene. Marcello must identify the bodies.

A somewhat similar theme appears in another highly underrated film, Educating Rita, a 1983 British offering based on a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. In it, the heroine, trying desperately to escape a dreary, mundane life, rooms with a vivacious roommate who seems to love and enjoy life and Gustav Mahler in equal and enthusiastic proportions. Yes, of course Rita returns home one day to find that her friend, the joyous lover of life, has killed herself.

Why bring this up on an otherwise cheerful morning? It’s just that I was thinking of people I’ve know who seem to have led impeccable lives. Mine, meantime, has been a constant struggle against addictions, rocky roads, underachievement, wastrel-leanings, and bad choices (except in marriage, profession, and friends). Somehow, I overcame the allure of sin’s bright colors and landed safely on a stable shore. Still, I wonder why I didn’t follow the leads of my impeccable friends and save a lot of time and heartbreak.

Then I think of these two favorite films and the epiphany comes. We just never know, do we, what demons rest in the souls of those about us? It wasn’t too many years ago that the top-ranking admiral of my beloved United States Navy committed suicide when enemies reported a minor infraction among the ribbons on his chest. He had risen from Seaman Recruit in a special program the Navy once had whereby promising enlisted personnel were selected for education and a commission. It seems that, no matter what his personal achievements accomplished, the Annapolis crowd never let him forget his humble origins.

We only have to look at the morning headlines to realize that life forms no straight path to either virtue or success. A brilliant but disturbed friend of mine described it thusly: “When you’re born, they give you a bucket. As you go through life, they fill it with … .” I won’t say with what he thought they filled it, but you get the picture. The last words I ever heard him say was that he was in a Navy “nut-ward” and had “given my bucket back to them.”

As the Bard of Avon once said, "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall." It’s scary, but, on the other hand, perhaps there is someone out there with a very heavy bucket who is ready to save us from all this. If so, it’s best that we not form instantaneous decisions about them.

Who knows?