Looking Back, Looking Ahead
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What is it about a good book or a good movie that affects us? Why are we
drawn to turn to the next page? Why do those commercials seem to last
forever?
It touches us. It reaches into each of us and touches us in a different way. That's why you'll get a different answer from each person you ask "What is your favorite?" Each of us is comprised of experiences that are unique to us. It's our history. A book or a movie is good if it brings out those experiences, if it shares our history. When I asked my friends at Opportunity Village "What is your favorite?" Here's their reply: "I like the Green Beret with John Wayne." "I like Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze." Military movies or romance books or fantasies or drama may be your favorite. It all is what makes you happy, based on your own collection of experiences, your history. In his book The Seven Wonders of the World, here's what Romer tells us about how modern architects are touched by architecture's past, its history: "Pheidias solved the problem of lighting his statue Zeus...as the architects of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington...lighting large statues in small rooms..." "The Rhodian Colossus stood by the sea...this location was selected too by the designers of the colossus standing on the seaboard of the entrance to New York." "So the Gardens of a Roman mercenary...became the gardens of the palaces of Schonbrunn and Versailles..." "Francois Dubois designed a lighthouse chapel shaped like an Egyptian Pyramid..." "The Temple of Artemis has become the headquarters of numberless banks and stock exchanges, the Mausoleum has spawned a multitude of Masonic temples, the Pharos, a thousand churches." Looking back, in effect, is looking ahead. |
Jim Holcombe
Marion, IA
