Chapter the Twenty-Ninth: In Which We Find That Comprehension Is Not the Same as Cure
The Anatomy of a Quiet Season
There is a particular quality to this present sorrow, different from the alarm of the first months, different from the outrage of the first year. Those were energetic emotions. This one is not.
I have been sitting with the question of what to say about any of it. Not for want of material.
It is not the despair of ignorance. That would be simpler, and in its way more dignified. What afflicts the attentive citizen in April of this year is something else: the despair of someone who understands the situation in considerable detail and finds that understanding has not purchased her very much.
We can explain it. We have gotten quite good at explaining it, which is its own variety of dark comedy, this practiced fluency we have developed for describing what we cannot stop. I have written now through twenty-eight chapters of the present arrangement, and the arrangement continues. The essays have been good, some of them. The arrangement does not read essays.
How do you fight money with words?
I have heard this question more times in the past month than I can account for. People I respect ask it, and people I don’t, and the fact that both sorts are asking it tells me something about where we are. There is no satisfying answer. I have looked for one. What I keep arriving at instead is a suspicion about the question itself: that it sounds like the beginning of an argument but functions, if one is not careful, as the end of one.
Despair is not a private matter. It feels private, arrives dressed as a personal response to an impossible situation, and in that sense it is genuine. But its effects are not personal at all, and they move in one direction. The fatigued citizen does not, as a rule, become a more dangerous opponent.
I do not say this to exhort anyone. The exhortation genre is exhausted, and I would not insult either of us by adding to it. I say it because the texture of this particular grief, the specific quality of knowing and being unable, does not feel accidental to me. Atmospheres like this one require cultivation.
There is a line between witnessing and accommodating. It is easy to locate in theory. In the middle of a long bad season, when the events have come at a pace calculated to dull rather than alarm, when what passes for normal has been quietly revised so many times you can no longer quite locate what the original looked like, the line is considerably harder to find.
I have lost it a few times myself, this past month. I have sat with the newspaper and felt nothing that resembled a useful emotion. I have started sentences and abandoned them. There is a peculiar shame in this, for someone who has appointed herself a chronicler of the present arrangements, which I note here only because it seems dishonest to write around it.
The question will resolve itself, one way or another. Questions do. They accumulate weight and then something shifts, and later everyone agrees they always knew it would.
What I find myself unable to locate, on this particular April morning, is the confidence that the resolution will be the right one. Not certainty of failure, I want to be precise about this. The absence of certainty of success. These are different conditions, and it is not useful to confuse them, though the confusion is understandable, and I confess I have engaged in it.
A person can know the difference and still, some mornings, find the distinction cold comfort.