Friday
My wife Julia reported herself “rattled” following the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Wednesday. She has been angrily pushing against Trump for so long, she said, that his sudden absence has unsettled her.
People emerging from abusive relationships often feel this way, I observed, and referred her to the Denise Levertov poem I shared this past Sunday. “It is hard sometimes,” the poet writes,
to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we’ve lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror. . . .
For fictional moments where people suddenly emerge into the sunlight, I think of the final scene in Carlos Saura’s movie Cria Cuervos (1976). A little girl, living in a dark, oppressive house where she has witnessed wrenching family trauma for the entirety of the film, emerges into the sunlight at the end, heading for school and a normal life. The film was made following the death of Spanish dictator Ferdinand Franco.
The concluding paragraphs of Wuthering Heights also speak to such times. Lockwood has just witnessed the final chapter of the Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs, whose family history was once filled with frustrated passion and seething rage where people tore each other apart. The storm has subsided, however, concluding with the far calmer marriage between young Catherine and Hareton. Lockwood thinks back to the previous generation as he visits their graves:
I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
How much time must elapse before we can gaze upon the Trump years with Lockwood’s sense of distance? Step one is watching order return to the the nation and listening to the sounds of orderly government commencing once more. Future generations will have difficulty imagining the unquiet era we have just experienced.