For years, I’ve told friends that a centerpiece of my own balancing act has been spending a week or two each summer at Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.
My personal advertisement touted Chautauqua as a place to get life in balance.
“You’d love it there!” I told anyone who would listen, and launched into a sales pitch for the idyllic 750-acre gated community my daughter calls “Disneyland for adults.” I’d go on to describe the dizzying array of lectures, concerts and plays, imposing Victorian houses and gardens, and the sense that there the clock had rewound to a quieter time.
It was a place, I said, where children rode their bikes on red brick streets, came home for lunch, licked ice cream cones.
Friends have so often heard my sales pitch for this place I’ve called “a piece of heaven” that when the brutal attack on lecturer Salman Rushdie occurred in the Chautauqua Amphitheater one Friday in August, my phone blew up.
“Are you at Chautauqua?” they wanted to know. “Were you there?”
Fortunately, I was not. And when I arrived a week or so later for a scheduled visit, the stage had been cleaned up, restored to the shiny hardwood that had long hosted the silky strains of the Chautauqua Symphony.
But, as a long-time Chautauquan observed, “the bubble had burst.” Somehow, violence from the outside world had rushed into this seemingly safe space. And instead of providing pure solace from the rest of the world, Chautauqua was struggling with its own balancing act.
I believe in learning from best practices. And post-attack Chautauqua offered many lessons in resilience. Institution officials praised those good people who had rushed forward to help and pledged to continue a tradition of free speech. There had been prayer vigils and press conferences. The Governor of New York had arrived to say, “The pen will always prevail over the knife.”
And in the final week of the nine-week season, when I was there, speakers inspired us to find common ground in divisive times, to listen to each other, and in a program in conjunction with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, to use the arts as a way of learning to communicate.
But still, in understandable and also disturbing ways, the outside world had clearly crept into the bubble. It was sobering to notice three armed guards standing at attention in khaki pants and white shirts at the Institution’s open-air Hall of Philosophy while an African-American scholar spoke about theology. When my water bottle rolled to the floor, I made eye contact with one of them and was extra careful picking it up.
The metal detector installed at the Amphitheater entrance was no different from anything I’d expect entering a courthouse or airport security. But there, its silver-blue posts felt chilling.
And it made sense to be newly restricted to small wristlets or clutch bags (4 ½” x “6 ½”) when we entered performance spaces. I discovered, as guys have for years, that pants pockets are enough for most essentials – a phone, a credit card, these days a mask.
But waiting in line to hear Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris, I came unmoored. A monitor was waving a card cut to the permissible dimensions, directing women to a bag-check table and shouting, “No knitting needles!” My late sister-in-law had laughed and knitted her way through a Carol Burnett performance there with me once.
“What,” I wondered, “would Marilyn think?”
This season, more than ever, I realized the extent to which Chautauqua had become my own brand of lake house, to which families return every year. No wonder I had pieced together affordable ways to visit – teaching a class to score a free gate pass, staying at various church denomination houses on the grounds, bringing two late husbands and several friends, and encouraging others to do the same – which I do even now as I am struggling with its new realities.
Maybe a Unitarian minister, speaking the first morning, of my visit, created the best metaphor for rebalancing the imbalance, both inside and outside Chautauqua’s gates. To soar, he said, we need to feel both pain and joy. Too much hurt and empathy can drag us down. Being with nature and with each other can pull us back up. We need both. And that, he said, is why eagles have two wings.
I want to feel the wisdom here.
Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder
