Roman Holiday
April 10, 2020 | By Sharla Moody, BK ‘22. Sharla is majoring in English.
And yet, every ending is also a beginning, as unthinkable as it may be in the first moments of experience.
*Subtle spoilers ahead*
My brother and I have a ritual: Every night that we are home together, and able, we watch a movie. In the span of the past few weeks, we have watched more films than I think ever before. Our list is rather eclectic, but we watch more good ones than bad, and we get to maintain one of the joys of human experience together, that is, appreciating good art.
Recently we watched the film Roman Holiday, a 1953 romance directed by the always sublime William Wyler, and starring two of the most beautiful and talented people to ever grace the silver screen, Gregory Peck and, in her Hollywood debut, Audrey Hepburn. As the title suggests, the movie is set in Rome and follows the encounters between an American reporter, Joe (Peck), and the crown Princess Ann (Hepburn) of an unnamed country who is in Rome for diplomacy business. It is a movie about beginnings and endings, and the brief time between that sustains the most powerful of emotions and tenderest of loves, and the sense of togetherness and apartness that define the highs and lows, the joys and sorrows, the yearnings and reliefs, that comprise this life.
I have been thinking about arrivals and departures and the time spent between more now in the past several weeks. It has been rather hard not to view the current events unfolding without resentment and grief that life has been interrupted and we are seemingly suspended in hazy limbo, waiting. We take snapshots of our lives, memories that we keep in boxes to pull out on certain occasions, and mentally looking through this year’s album fills me with ill-fated yearning and anger. There’s this sense that everything that happened this year was a waste if it ended too soon; if the play you were supposed to star in got postponed, if nothing quite happened with your campus crush, if all the cover letters you slaved over yielded only cancelled internships, acquaintances-turned-budding-friends that are put on pause until fall, then it would have been better that these things had never happened at all. What are these if not reminders of things, time, people, experiences lost?
Roman Holiday is conscious of its timeline: the princess is only in town for a few days, and the reporter knows this. And yet they fall in love, dizzyingly and recklessly fast, as they approach the end flashing ahead in clear view. I wonder how they felt, diving into this new, precarious beginning and knowing the heartache that likely waited at the end of their ever so temporary time together. And I wonder whether I would have chosen not to pursue the wonderful things that I did if I had known how they would end and how I would at times feel about their endings. And, on Friday, we recognize the worst ending in the history of the cosmos: our Lord, Jesus Christ, giving Himself in complete humiliation to be crucified for the sake of a crowd that utterly rejects Him.
And yet, every ending is also a beginning, as unthinkable as it may be in the first moments of experience. The COVID-19 outbreak ushered in a new time of isolation, of family, of anxiety, and shifts in governance, public health, and economics will likely be attributed to the pandemic. Perhaps for the last time, I am spending months with my parents and brother, who will be graduating from college, all under the same roof and enjoying good art together. Though Roman Holiday does not show us an “after,” it is not difficult to imagine one for Joe and Ann. And, thankfully, Good Friday is not the ultimate end, but simply the beginning of a time of mourning, a time of mystery, before the greatest, most joyous occasion to ever occur in all the myriads of galaxies. And so, while we wait in this limbo with the hope of a happy end, we celebrate Easter, the ending of our struggle and the beginning of our redemptions through the precious blood of Christ. For everything there is a season, a time to be born, a time to die, and the briefest of moments between. Yet even that ending is not truly the end, for we have faith that we will wake in a perfect beginning with no end.