For the past few months not only has a lot of the news been extremely depressing, but it’s been appearing on so many fronts that I have at least thirty stories to choose from each day for my blog posts. I’m not superwoman and just can’t cover them all, so I pick the ones that either interest me the most or on which I think I have the most interesting things to say, and I leave it at that.
But the residue of all the bad news sticks to me, to a certain extent, even though I try to shed it. And then of course there are personal matters: trying to work on Gerard’s book launch (which seems to involve a thousand surprisingly time-consuming tasks), planning a summer trip out west that should end up being fun but requires juggling the schedules of many people (another surprisingly time-consuming – and frustrating – task), and of course the continual absence of Gerard now that over a year has passed.
If only the news of the world were better. For now we see through a glass, darkly, and so I try to be optimistic. I certainly realize I can’t see the future, and it might be better – even much better – than it looks now. However:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself; …
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
That last poem, by Robert Frost, is especially laconic and deceptively simple – almost like a child’s nursery rhyme. But it says a great deal.
All of the poems convey a sense of foreboding, and it’s hard not to feel that sort of dread today. I don’t think that emotion is the province of one side or another; from what I can see among the people I know, it’s shared by both, although exactly what they dread and their idea of the mechanism by which it could and perhaps will occur is quite different.
And yet, spring is here. I took this photo a few days ago near where I live. What’s unusual about it isn’t apparent in the photo, but it was a bunch of teeny miniature daffodils that had apparently seeded themselves in an area where nothing had been cultivated or purposely planted. They were just standing there alone, a real surprise: