“Now I don't pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day soon man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future, and those are the days worth living for.”
This statement was made by a character in a film or tv show sometime during the 20th century. Any guesses before I post the answer?
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DeleteLooks good - love the background art!
I have no idea where that quote is from, but for some reason I'm picturing Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer!
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DeleteThanks Mark, glad you like it. The art is actually my own creation - an attempt to have some fun with colors. We can put anything we want here, load photos, etc. If you want to post a topic I’ll either load you in as a blog author or copy anything that you want to post from our current email conversation, until we figure out what works best.
DeleteGood guess on the source of the quote. Here’s some more hints:
The fictional character who makes that statement runs a mission for poor men in NYC in 1930 during the depths of the Great Depression. Just before the men begin to eat their soup and bread, they are required listen. Instead of the expected talk about God or Jesus, we get this statement instead. It is an appeal to scientific progress as the savior and source of hope for humanity, not God.
Not only will humanity harness enormous energies, but it will do so for the good of all, and not for the purpose of making war or for the greed of a few to become rich. This person is pretty convinced that such a common future in coming, in the same way a that millennial Christian is convinced that Jesus is coming. Humans, through they own inherent capacities will create their own heaven on Earth. What we’ve got here is a summation of the entire Enlightenment project, a future secular utopia awaits, if we play our cards right. It seems to me that this idea is still deep in the minds of those people who still think of themselves as liberal or progressive.
OK, by now you’re probably growing weary of my foolishness. So here’s the final hint:
DeleteThere are two men sitting among the others who don’t really belong there. They are listening to what is being said and they are amazed because they are from the future and everything that was said in that statement really did happen. The Earth did unite and eliminate poverty, war, and hunger, and humans did travel to distant worlds in spaceships.
The people who wrote this story which aired in April 1967, were living in a time of dramatic technological progress. This was especially true in two areas - space travel and nuclear weapons. One is hopeful the other is frightening. There were no nuclear weapons 25 years earlier and there was no such thing as space travel a mere ten years earlier. So the people who wrote this assumed that the pace of technological change in these areas would continue at that accelerated pace. They chose to believe that the good technological change would overwhelm the bad, and that humanity would come to its senses ethically before they destroyed themselves.
Wow, I'm still drawing a blank. It sounds familiar, but I can't place it. You'll have to spill the beans, and don't say it's a twilight zone episode...
DeleteOn a totally different topic: I just watched one of the first Powell/Pressburger films, 49th Parallel, in which a U-boat gets sunk in Hudson Bay (!) and surviving Nazi crew members are on the run across Canada, which was intended as WW2 propaganda to help coax the US into the war, illustrating just what total bastards the Nazis are and how you can't ignore them (the laid-back freedom-loving backwoods Canadians learn hard lessons on this score!) because that just allows them to continue invading and killing their way towards world conquest. However, the movie is so inventive and dark and quirky that it's its own creature, writhing with emotion like a snake on hot asphalt. (How's that for thumbnail film criticism?) And wonderful location shooting in remote areas of Canada, with Eskimo villages and native Americans and French-Canadian trappers (a hot-dogging performance by Laurence Olivier) and even a semi-poncy British ethnographer (Leslie Howard) living in the Rockies in a teepee with Picasso and Matisse paintings he just had to bring with him into the wilderness who ends up being a badass when he needs to be. ("And here's one for Matisse!" SMACK! "And here's one for Picasso!" POW!) Next Powell movie I'm watching: Canterbury Tale, filmed right after 49th, I think. Here's a Guardian piece about it, which the author describes as "a thing of such fragile, broken glory, like some tubercular saint."
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/oct/25/favourite-film-canterbury-tale
This is the final frontier on the riddle of the quote.
ReplyDeleteThe two guys were Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock dressed in 1930's duds which they had to steal. They jumped through a time porthole on a distant planet in search of McCoy who was in a drug induced deranged state when he jumped through. McCoy had somehow changed history so drastically that there was no Enterprise. The story (The City on the Edge of Forever) was written by Harlan Ellison. The social worker who read the statement who was named Edith Keeler (a name that I felt was deliberately designed to evoke Helen Keller) and was played perfectly by Joan Collins, and Shatner’s acting is wonderfully toned down, which is always a positive. I felt that her little speech was a good summation of the optimistic spirit of Star Trek which was also part of the spirit of the times. You can see this also in the film 2001, which was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s best educated guess at where we would be technologically. Those guys were geniuses, so it’s sobering to see how badly they were fooled.
I’m a big fan of the original series of Star Trek, but I can understand people who aren’t. There was quite a bit of hokum and plenty of real stinker episodes, after all, they had to do stuff that they thought would appeal to eight yr olds like me. But there was some real magic in the character relationships between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy that I don’t think can be matched by many tv shows. This episode is one of about a half dozen, perhaps more, that really hooked those of us who are so fond of the show. Btw, how many 60’s tv adventure shows had characters quoting Milton or expected you to have heard of Spinoza and Johannes Brahms?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever