"After great pain, a formal feeling comes"

Breathing out, and some recs.

I sent out my last newsletter about an hour before the historic attempt to overthrow an election, and like so many of us, I held my breath through January 20.

It’s been said over and over, but I’ll join in saying that I know our problems aren’t fixed, politicians aren’t saints and saviors, corruption still exists, our systems are still in bad shape, we’re still in a pandemic, justice is still not available to enough people nor fairly distributed, and…etc, all of it! But, man. I can’t not feel relieved that the agent of chaos who has held enormous power for the last four years is out.

I had a meltdown the other night, of the sort I would have thought I’d have weekly the way these last—hmmm ten months to four years?—have gone, but I’ve actually been “fine” which I can now put in air quotes because obviously, I wasn’t. None of us are.

What I learned through my meltdown is that I’m really good at masking my anxiety, not only to others but to myself. Sometimes I stop and realize it’s probably not “normal” or “healthy” or “fine” to be constantly scanning my mind for an unresolved source of worry and then ruminating on it constantly in the background while I go about my life. My early childhood of anxiety and chaos prepared me well for 2020 and is probably part of why I believed I was dealing with all of the extremes of the last year pretty well. Now that I’m exhaling a little, it’s all beginning to land. Maybe you can relate.

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I watched two movies this month that made me think a lot about both the gifts and the challenges of getting older:

Another Round sounded like a no-go for me when I read the description, given my family’s history with alcohol, but I do love Mads Mikkelsen and I wound up loving this movie. It made me think, yeah, there's no time machine, no way to get back to a state where life is all new and wondrous, where joy is accessible without the layers of accumulated bullshit to claw through. We try things to fix that or forget it, to our benefit or detriment, but we always eventually have to face the truth. Mads gives Kevin Bacon a run for his money for best white guy movie dancing in the final scene.

Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary about a handful of people at The Villages, a strange, sprawling retirement community in Florida. It’s odd and funny and you can laugh at some of the more ridiculous things about humans, but you're never laughing at them. (At least, you'd better not be, because it’s all of us.) It’s a rare and unsentimentalized look at the emotional lives of people in a life stage we don’t like to think about too much in this culture.

I’m still reading Youngblood Hawke; the end is in finally in sight. Wouk’s writing is constantly impressing me, especially how much characterization he accomplishes through dialog. One of our bedtime audiobooks has been Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, which I’m enjoying much more than I thought possible, but I am very eager to get back into some contemporary fiction when I’m done with the Wouk doorstopper.

Finally, the title of this edition of the newsletter comes courtesy of Emily Dickinson, who wrote, during the Civil War:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Aught –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

I’ve been browsing a lot of poetry lately as the world right now feels so hard to describe in direct prose. Dickinson’s brevity and, in some cases, inscrutability, feels right at the moment. This all goes double for Amanda Gorman’s breathtaking performance of the inaugural poem, which may have been the moment I began to feel some hope that the “hour of lead” might be starting to pass.

(I’d love to know which poems are articulating something for you right now…)

Until next time,
Sara