What’s It All About, Emilie? — Love Song to My Life

Bill and I flew to New York last week to see our daughter’s amazing performance in the play about one of the first female physicist whose life work was to disprove Newton’s Laws of Physics and prove the formula that would be used later by other scientists, including Einstein, as the basis for the theory of relativity.

Emilie: Le Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson* is a powerful, humorous, and emotional telling of the Marquise’s story by Emilie herself, now three centuries after she died in childbirth before her work was finished and before she received the credit she deserved.

In the play, the tensions with which this 18th century woman lived in order to be a mathematician and researcher makes her, now looking back, puzzle over two great forces of her life: love and science. These tensions informed many of her choices both positive and negative.

For Bill and me, the power of story and the depth of our daughter’s performance left us both proud and drained. The conclusive monologues by Emilie were for us reminiscent of both the speeches of the Stage Manager and Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (which Bill and I directed together when we taught high school English) and the conclusions Solomon came to in the final chapter of Ecclesiastes.

Both Emily in Our Town and Emilie le Marquise du Chatelet died in childbirth long before their work was done. Both struggled with leaving relationships, as well as life itself, unfinished. Both had revelations about the meaning of life when they looked back at their choices and priorities.

For these two women (one in the 18th century, one in the early 20th century) there was so much that ended before its time. They both had to come to grips with the questions: What is eternal? What lasts? Did I matter and what defines mattering? What do I hold to when all else fails?

Emilie La Marquis says at the end:

All we have is the moment of having
And the hope that we knew something real....

Emily in Our Town ends her conclusion with another question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” And maybe this is the question that is as near to an answer as we get—no answers, but better, deeper questions to which (as the poet Rannier Marie Rilke suggested) we are willing to live ourselves into the answers.

As for Solomon, unlike these two women, his life was not cut short. He didn’t struggle for publication or options for his days. He had it all, did it all, indulged himself in every way. He built it all and enjoyed power, wealth, possessions, accumulation, and prestige. As for reputation, he was crowned the wisest man who ever lived. Yet his conclusion for all this was, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Looking back with regret on his long life of striving, he declared that the thing he should have known in the beginning was this:

Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man;
For God will bring every deed unto judgement, including every hidden thing whether it is good or evil.

So, what is the takeaway for us? Maybe it is to live our lives and to teach our children to live each day recognizing what is eternal in each moment—in big things (what makes them big?) and in little things (by whose assessment?). Will it last? “... And when time has surrendered, and earth is no more...” what then?

In our waking and in our sleeping, in our working and our playing, in community and in solitude, in our aspirations and in any accomplishment, ask God to show us what is real and what is earnest, and then to give ourselves away for what will outlast time itself.

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