What Has Life Taught Me?

Many years ago I saw a silent Polish film no longer than ten minutes. Its story kept coming back to my mind from time to time, especially whenever I saw one of my family or acquaintances encounter something in his life that he could not repel or control. The simple story begins with the view of a vast sea, out of which two men emerge fully dressed, carrying together, each at one end, a huge old wardrobe with three doors and a large mirror on its middle door. The two men walk toward the shore, carrying the wardrobe with great difficulty, until they reach land utterly exhausted, and then they start wandering around the city while still carrying the wardrobe. When they want to board the tram, they try to climb the steps with the wardrobe amid the crowd of passengers and shouts of protest. When they become hungry and want to enter a restaurant, they try to enter with the wardrobe and the owner throws them out. The film consists only of footage of their desperate attempts to go on living while carrying their heavy wardrobe, until they end up going back the way they came, reaching the shore we saw at the start of the film, and then gradually disappearing into the sea, where the water engulfs them while they are still carrying the wardrobe. Since I saw this film, I have pictured myself and everyone I know as though each of us carries his own heavy wardrobe, which comes with him into the world, and he spends his life carrying it without any chance of getting rid of it, and then dies while still carrying it. It is, however, an invisible wardrobe, and we may spend our lives pretending that it does not exist, or what we think are our own choices. I did not choose my father and mother, or the kind of family I grew up in, or the number of my siblings and my position among them. I did not choose my height or shortness, or the degree of my good looks or plainness, or the points of strength and weakness in my body and mind. All of this I must carry wherever I go, and I have no hope of getting rid of it.