I think this is a good time to tell you that the Cartwright interests have just begun building a new bank in Grover’s Corners – had to go to Vermont for the marble, sorry to say. And they’ve asked a friend of mine what they should put in the cornerstone for people to dig up… a thousand years from now… Of course, they’ve put in a copy of the New York Times and a copy of Mr Webb’s Sentinel. … We’re kind of interested in this because some scientific fellas have found a way of painting all that reading matter with a glue – a silicate glue – that’ll make it keep a thousand – two thousand years.
We’re putting in a Bible… and the Constitution of the United States – and a copy of William Shakespeare’s plays. What do you say, folks? What do you think?
Y’know – Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts… and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney – same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for theatre back then.
So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand from now’ll know a few simple facts about us – more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.
See what I mean?
So – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century – This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.
[A choir partially concealed in the orchestra pit has begun singing ‘Blessed Be the Tie That Binds’.]
Our town [fragment]
uit: Our town and other plays - Thornton Wilder
