moving day

It must be the season, last evening Julie Andrews was on in the living room. "The Sound of Music" came out while we were stationed in Japan, living in Yokohama. We first saw "Mary Poppins" at a theater in Tokyo, maybe we first saw "Sound of Music" in Tokyo also, I don't remember but that seems far more likely than during our next Navy tour, in Washington DC, when I was so totally, and in retrospect absurdly and Time of life wastingly, caught up in my career as a workaholic Naval officer instead of camping up in the Blue Ridge mountains with my family. 

A much loved classic with a supposed historical basis, "Sound of Music" was highly romanticized in the events and substantially altered in dating the von Trapp family (see https://www.history.com/news/the-real-history-behind-the-sound-of-music). The film brings it into my generation of extreme antipathy toward Germans and Germany in my early years that I have not been able to shed in a lifetime. And I am always struck by the portrayal of Liesl's boyfriend Rolfe, the beguiling innocence of a teenage boy in his messenger uniform courting his girl and they are so in love, and suddenly, a shock, the epiphany of treachery, evil in an altogether totally different uniform and person. Rolfe is as fictional as Alessandro in Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War" but Alessandro finishes his story, whereas I am always left wondering how life turned out for Rolfe. The difference in fiction and Truth, which Pontius Pilate stirs so poignantly, "What is Truth?" is largely in the mind: one Truth for the participant on the scene back in the day; another Truth for s/he who reads it in another day and age. As our present American day attests, Truth may be as much visualization, hope, imagination, trust, confidence, wishing, romantization or reaction to fear as what the "historian" puts down on paper or film from his/her own perspective as just another human being. Anymore, even the camera can lie. And is my Truth changed by my dreams, my night terrors about what is? By opening my subconscious, unconscious fantasies of what might have been and, having dreamed, is, was, becomes Truth? I have thought, even hoped, so at times. In the truth of beautifully related fiction, Alessandro ended uniting with his story, his story was his Truth; but what happened with the young man who traveled with him? Or with StThomas? Or with Rolfe, back to Rolfe ... 

I am thinking of what Alessandro said to his traveling companion at the end, "And yet if you asked me what the truth was, I can't tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children."  

Truth has overwhelmed me too. Now this is another Moving Day for us. From building #3 third floor to building #1 third floor. Major noticeable and challenging to the mind is that the new condo is exactly the same as this one, but mirror opposite. Same as other Truth, a matter of perspective.

But the building #1 elevator goes to level five, which is the roof, a large, open to the skies recreation area and lounge. We went up there last evening for a look round. Too dark to know truly whether the Sea is visible.

IDK. IDK a dandelion thing. As for Truth, I do know what I learned from that Marine Corps major eventually lieutenant colonel who was my traveling companion those sixty years ago, that just because I believe it, that don't make it so.
T