Harper Pennington: Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel (1891-01-03)
COLLECTION
Prints depicting dance
Theatrical dancers in groups or more than two but not in a ballet or theatrical dance scene
Josephine Butler collection of dance prints from illustrated periodicals

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "Holiday festivities in colonial times; dancing the Virginia reel" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed February 7, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/24c44fb0-f763-013b-db97-0242ac110002)

“Maybe all life qualifies as representational,
merely so many shadows on those cavern walls.”

Real life has always paralleled unrealistic representations of itself. The differences were explained as poetic or metaphoric, since no mirror image can ever be true to its image’s source. The mirror fiddles with perspective, but it provides access to experiences otherwise impossible. We somehow thrive in spite, or perhaps because of, obvious imperfections. The purists among us might deride the representations as not being “real”, though they certainly inhabit a 1820s real-enough space of their own. A novel might be fictional but still adequately-enough represent its subjects.

Social media’s little different, though it does prominently display some rather glaring contrasts. Consequently, it might seem utterly unique when compared with other representations in history. When photography was first introduced in the 1820s, it must have seemed astounding, though the early products hardly stood out as outstanding when compared with paintings and drawings. Photographs began as crude representations before managing to produce far superior images than those available by other means. Even then, people were clear that those images were not real in the way that their subjects were. They were borrowed or stolen, taken from their source, and still merely representations.

In some ways, the ReelLife presented in social media seems far superior to what real life seems capable of delivering. Real life often produces ponderous productions that seem to take forever to deliver any point. ReelLife can present crisp snippets that deliver their gists in seconds. ReelLife is no replacement for real-life experience, but it can deliver satisfying complements. The question should never rise to the level of one or the other, for only the real could be capable of existing without the other. ReelLife, however situationally superior, was never intended to be a replacement for real-life experience.

But with ever-growing technological sophistication, who doesn’t find ReelLife increasingly infringing upon the real? Life doesn’t stop when I focus on any representation. Life marches on, still evolving, while I seemingly stand aside. I might gain useful insight standing aside, or I might just manage to waste a little more of my purportedly precious time. Whatever. Nobody spends all of every day strolling through art galleries. We at least break regularly for real meals.

I might carry an inner prejudice against ReelLife. I acknowledge that its content isn’t real, yet I still feel a great attraction to its essentially illusory content. I feel weak and dirty if I indulge too openly in ReelLife. I won’t advertise or even report the hours I spent focused on representations instead of primary sensory sources. I value an hour gazing out my office window more highly than I value an hour spent gazing into social media’s unblinking eye. I imagine I’m gaining something much more valuable gazing out my window than from glazing in front of any flickering screen. Am I?

My ReelLife isn’t going anywhere. It’s probably destined to expand its proportion of my attention span. The history of representational imagery strongly suggests that I will never completely rid myself of it, but that it will continue consuming at least as much of my attention as it ever did before, and probably more. It might be that I eventually meld into a movie of myself, projecting experience as if primary when actually representational. My experience then might not seem any different, since I’ll lack any baseline experience to compare it with. Maybe all life qualifies as representational, merely so many shadows on those cavern walls.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz