Article January 5, 1998 Issue

The delight of life

Life's an adventure. Celebrate it!

By Channing Walker

During the late nineteen thirties, while economic hardship lumbered across the United States, playwright William Saroyan charted a path of warmth and delight in his Putlitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life. It is a comic valentine of a play. Depression era audiences found it an assuring lamp in the darker surroundings of the time; a light on the smallest of moments, celebrating each one for the sheer joy of life itself.

If the mood of the nineties is less somber than the thirties, it is more harried. Uncertainties and insecurities seem to come faster and hit harder. Which makes the reminder all that more meaningful. Life is not about all the material possessions one can hoard, nor about all the recognition and personal achievements one can rack up.

"In the time of your life, live," wrote Saroyan in a preface to the play, "so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values. ... In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."