The Tragic Imagination

The days are growing longer. Standing knee-deep in the snow at noon, you can feel the sun on your face. And if there is any doubt that spring is coming, the birds are here to sing us into hope. Nevertheless, the winter of our discontent is morphing into the spring of our despair. Never in all my years in this country have I seen those around me so full of dread.

There is a lot of talk about Nazi Germany, and the parallels with our nation’s present situation. Me, I think about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which an army insurrection toppled the democratically-elected leftist government and led to three years of fratricidal conflict. The war left a million dead and was followed by forty years of dictatorship. I think about my father, forced to hide in his Barcelona apartment for those three years. And I think about my mother, living on her parents’ farm, cowering in ditches at midnight to escape the bombings.

By the time I was born five years later, there was “peace.” If you kept your head low and didn’t publish risky stuff and didn’t have friends or relatives who had fought against Franco, things were somewhat ok. The tribe of loving adults surrounding me wouldn’t have dreamed of darkening my infant joys with tales of loss and sorrow. But in my earliest memories, as I play under my grandfather’s apple tree or sit on my mother’s lap after dinner, I hear the  grownups murmuring, “They killed her brother during the war,” or “He was dragged out from under the sofa and taken away by anarchists,” or “They were so hungry that before bed they had to fill their stomachs with water so they could fall asleep.”

Barely more than a toddler, I wondered at the perennial sadness in my paternal grandmother’s smile. My mother explained that my father’s older brother had died at the end of the war because there were no doctors to treat his illness. On the farm, my mother’s mother was more cheerful, her immediate family having survived, but she was anxious all the time. Whenever the ancient cart horse was led out of the stable to be harnessed, she would shake her head and say, “any day now, that horse is going to kill somebody.” My mother too was anxious, but her feelings of doom were focused on my, according to her, precarious health. “Whenever things were going well,” she told me later about those years, “I felt that God was hovering with a big stick, waiting to hit me over the head.” With such a load of anxiety in my DNA, it would be a wonder if I had escaped this legacy of the war. I did not.

When I arrived in the US as a teenager, I was struck by how cheerful everybody seemed. The nuns in my school were cheerful, and so were my friends’ parents, and my parents’ friends. Unlike my family, these adults seemed oblivious to the fact that we were all hanging by the thinnest of threads. Americans, I told myself, simply lacked the tragic imagination.

Now that is changing before my very eyes. Never have I seen so much anxiety in my friends’ faces. There is anger, too, and sorrow, and the determination to resist. But mostly I see a sense of vulnerability and precariousness that seems completely new in my experience of the American temperament. It reminds me of my grandmothers, both the sad one and the anxious one.

What to do, how to be in times like these? We’ve all heard the wisdom: do what good you can; protect yourself from overexposure to the news; focus on the here and now. And then there’s this, from Jane Hirschfield’s poem, “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.