Nothing's Lost Forever

Angels in America is one of my favourite plays ever. I love the whole magical realism and I love Harper and her whimsical utterings and her lapses into words that sound like poetry, and...anyway, this is the last scene with her. She is leaving. And she has been completely devastated. But our last memory of her is not one of ruin and desolation. Surprisingly, there is hope. New beginnings. There is always hope.



Harper appears. She is in a window seat on board a jumbo jet, airborne.

Harper: Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we'll have reached the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.

I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening...

But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed, joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

At least, I think that's so.