I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately. ‘Tis the season. Yet, lately hope has seemed elusive. A year ago at this time, the air was filled with hope. The end of the pandemic seemed within sight as initial doses of the covid vaccine were being given; the political landscape promised a kinder, more just future with the Biden-Harris administration soon to be sworn in; movements for racial justice seemed to be gaining momentum. How quickly things changed. At times, despair for the world can seem overwhelming.
Yet despair seems too easy. In the past year and half, I’ve reflected often on all that my parents lived through before I was born – WWI, the 1918 pandemic, the Depression, WWII – and I’ve wished I could talk with them about how they endured those hardships with their spirits intact. Whenever I got weepy when I was young, my mother would say to me, “You’ve got to get tough, Beth. You’ve got to get tough.” But my mother was not a tough woman. She was gracious, tender, loving. The advice she gave me more often was to end each day with something lovely. Thumbtacked over her bed in the corkboard wall in our family cabin, I suppose so she would see it just before sleep, was Sara Teasdale’s poem “Barter.” It begins:
“Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup….”
I can imagine my mother keeping this poem close in the years she was raising two small children alone while my father was in the Philippines, having been conscripted into the Army to serve as doctor in World War II.
Several of my most admired writers on the human condition are of the generation who lived through World War II – Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir, and especially, Albert Camus. Camus wrote often about beauty, its power to redeem us, and to rescue us from despair. Camus grew up surrounded by the beauty of the sea and sky in the town of Algiers on the Mediterranean. It was a refuge for him. As he noted, living in a place of such everyday beauty made even living in stark poverty seem “sumptuous.” “Raised above all in the spectacle of a beauty that was my only wealth, I had begun in plenty” (164). I think of this often, grateful for the wealth of beauty that surrounds me. Living in a place where the great blue saltless sea and sky meld into each other and ancient rocks rise up from the shore, I know the way they cause my spirit to rise, and how running with my dog on the great sand beach at sunrise can fill every breath with joy.
Spending months of his late teens in and out of the hospital with tuberculosis gave Camus an intense appreciation of the beauty of the world outside its walls. In his “Nuptials at Tipasa,” written when he was 24, he describes the coastal town of Tipasa as a place “inhabited by gods . . . who speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone” (65). Here he was alive again. As he proclaimed, “I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. . . . this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. . . . Everything here leaves me intact” (69).
But during World War II he found himself cut off, exiled. Having missed the last boat back to Algiers before such travel was ended by the war, he was literally living in exile in Paris. Tyranny, barbed wire, bombed out buildings, the ugliness of war and the worst of humanity defined it as “. . . a time of exile, dry lives, dead souls” (165), with the deepest, most penetrating exile being that “. . . we have exiled beauty” (148).
It seems we are in a similar time of exile. Arias sung from balconies have turned to chants of hate, hanging, and harangue, while cheers have become jeers for health care workers, exhausted by their unrequited efforts. Even the creative intelligence of viral organisms continues to outwit us – ever-changing, ever-challenging. The crisis that for a short while seemed to bring out the best in us, now seems to be bringing out the worst. In this darkening time, we seem to be heading into another winter of our discontent.
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer – Albert Camus.” Those were the words on the poster on my college dorm room door. For years, those words got me through winters of hospitalizations, lost loves, disillusionments, deaths and near-deaths. Coming of age in a time when I fully believed it was possible to change the world, immersed in uplifting feminist, environmental, peace and justice movements, the hope of the “invincible summer” was alive and well. Justice, even if distant, was always possible. Only recently have I found myself at times gripped in portents of an eternal winter unfazed by summer’s warmth, as the wellspring of humanity appears to be iced in at all turns.
In those seemingly endless war years, Camus may have felt this grip as well, even as he continued his Resistance efforts. Yet, returning to his beloved Tipasa years later, sobered by years of living through WWII and the Nazi occupation of Paris, Camus reflected, “ . . . in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky never left me. It was this that in the end had saved me from despair. . . "(168). In the worst years of our madness — what an apt description for the times we are living in. And yet, here, too, this truth – beauty endures as an antidote to the ravages of this time. As he wrote, “in order to prevent justice from shriveling up, from becoming nothing but a magnificent orange with a dry, bitter pulp, I discovered one must keep a freshness and a source of joy intact within” (168). Seeking moments of beauty does not mean abandoning the quest for justice and compassion. Rather it restores us as both sustenance and inspiration in continuing efforts to resist the madness. “There is beauty and there are the humiliated. . . . I would like never to be unfaithful either to the one or the other” (169-170). The wisdom of Camus was to resist the either/or of false binaries, and instead to embrace the life that arises from the tension between the two. For, “isolated beauty ends in grimaces, solitary justice in oppression. Anyone who seeks to serve the one to the exclusion of the other serves no one. . . “(165). At those times when efforts for justice seem futile, and the ugliness of the worst of humanity overwhelms, beauty restores and renews, reminding us of what we were fighting for in the first place. In the words of one of my favorite songs:
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.
Several nights ago, I dreamed of the end of the world. As the dome of the Capitol building collapsed in on itself, people began running, trying to escape the destruction; trying to outrun the end of the world itself. I found myself running as well, but not just away. I was running to – first to friends and comrades in the struggle; then toward a stream with lush trees and flowers and waterfalls, clear that I wanted my last moment on earth to be filled with beauty. Suddenly, the scene switched, and I was inside the home of an old woman who needed nothing more than to tuck me into bed and sing me to sleep. Initially I resisted, then was filled with a clarity that allowing her to fulfil this need by accepting her care was an act of generous love on my part, and that this was the greatest beauty I could know. Whether found in lullabies, the bubbling of water over rocks, the stars on a clear night, the face of a loved one, the generosity of love – beauty lifts our despair, lightens us with hope.
I began by pondering hope, and found friendship, justice-seeking, love, and beauty. Indeed, these are the places of hope in our lives -- a tender glance, a gift of soup and bread, a care package in the mail, the bold colors of a maple forest in autumn, the flit of a chickadee, the swirled labyrinth of a rose, the everyday actions of those who despite all odds continue to do the work of healing the world. At times despair for the madness of this moment can overwhelm me, and then, like Camus, beauty – whether of the earth or of the human spirit -- will fill me with a redeeming wonder and joy. On those days when the sky and lake are a blue so deep and vast, everything again seems possible.
Notes
Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Ed. Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
Oppenheim, James. “Bread and Roses.” December 1911. American Publishing House. Colver Publishing House, 214.