Most evenings lately I’ve been reading a couple of pages of May Sarton’s disconcertingly candid, lyrical journals. Even the most painful entries – laments of loneliness, of rage, loss and illness – offer an offbeat solace. Perhaps it is because she writes so personally, and yet so universally.
Sarton, a Belgium-American poet, diarist and novelist, who died from breast cancer in 1995, suffered recurring bouts of depression, which she described as “storms”; as “attacks from within”.
In an entry from her Journal of A Solitude, dated September 1972, in the middle of one such attack, she writes:
“But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.”
Reading this again last night, I thought – inevitably, because all roads right now lead here – of the election, and of what May Sarton’s reflections on the last four years would have been; of what she might have written.
Perhaps she would simply have recorded the exact same diary entry this autumn as she did almost forty years ago – the perfect description of her personal misery, juxtaposed with the prevailing, raging sadness of America.
I don’t believe there has ever been an election where so much has been at stake, where so many people have battled for and fought for change, that has been so utterly empty of joy and hope. Every action, every speech, every campaign, is a grind. Joe Biden calls it a “battle for the soul of America”, but no one knows what that means. And as far as I can see, no one cares as much about winning as they do about the other side losing.
Even those campaigning for another four years of Donald Trump in the White House aren’t doing it out of love for him, but out of hatred for their ‘liberal’ counterparts. Besides, Trump is only a symbol of hatred. When he’s gone, people will, as they invariably do, find others.
So I worry what our particular painful on-going storm will leave in its wake. There’s been plenty of powerful truths in it, and shown up much that needs fixing: disaffection, fear, misery, the physical and mental poverty of many. But our storm has shown us other things – hatred, intolerance, racism, bigotry – and what it has left exposed is too raw, and its demands too ugly, to allow us an easy recovery.
Every year I reread Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – and although I know it all works out in the end and the eagles come to the rescue, I still share that constant shiver of fear felt by Frodo and Sam: even if we do manage to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, how on (middle) earth are we supposed to get back?
The last four, shocking years of American political life, the divisive language, the untruths and personal attacks, the roaring-up-crashing-down economy, the marches and murders and anger, the racial hatred, the misogyny, the ever-deepening entrenched bitterness, will leave us with years of repercussions. And I haven’t even mentioned the seemingly unending horror of Covid-19 (until I did, just now).
Faced with a deranged and angry bear – you’ll have to put up with this analogy; bad-tempered bears, like elections, are also on my mind as one has just been at the trash again – you’re bound to forget that the woods are also filled with lions and tigers.
If Joe Biden wins this election – and (sorry, I really should have said this sooner) I believe he will, convincingly and completely enough to stop Trump’s threatened lawsuits and sieges – no one knows how we will get back home. How will we return to hope and health and prosperity; to mutual understanding and cooperation, to a country at least broadly united? Because right now, America is the loneliest, saddest place on earth.
Here’s an entry I’ve just found from another of May Sarton’s journals, this time from 5th November 1982:
“Home again in a torrential rain, the whole walk plastered with the crimson leaves of the maple, all fallen, which gave an air of desolation to the house as though it had been abandoned. November indeed. It is always the saddest month here.”
Sums things up nicely, doesn’t it?
Kath Raymond Hinton 