Lightly, My Darling

Sometimes the good news comes in the dark.

It’s been a heavy week. I don’t just mean the politics. Politics this week was just the occasion that sent me deep into the Twitter feed, despite my best efforts to quit that habit. Slogging through post after post, you eventually forget what you’re looking for and get plunged into a thick current of people’s large and small miseries. At least that’s how it feels sometimes: cries of the heart, crowding the air.

Someone lost a baby. Someone else lost a home. Someone is really, frighteningly sick. Against the weight of these enormities the power struggles of great men weigh less than a breath; “placed in the scale, they rise.” There are the sorrows we burrow into and the ones that just drench us unavoidably, undeservedly. Some of it is unique to our moment in history but the bulk of it is always there, part of our human weather system. The air is thick with it. A weeping world of so much grief: enough to drown in.

Easy to give comfort when you’re on dry land. Cruelly difficult to receive it when you’re underwater. The old story goes that when the prodigal son was trudging hesitantly back home, his father ran to him “while he was still a long way off.” It makes me wonder how he made it all that way, from the seat of joy to the farthest reaches of despair. An infinite distance.

But he sprinted across it gladly, lightly. So the story goes. I think it’s a true story, not in the shallow sense that I think it happened somewhere once, but in the deep sense that it happens all the time, to me. The most wondrous thing isn’t the pristinely lucid arguments for divine providence that I read in moments of serene contemplation, lovely as those are. The real miracle is the fact of providence itself, which is not so much something you read about as something you bump into in the dark.

A little crack left open in the cold cement walls of the world, as if by accident: out there in the trenches, that’s what we call good news. For me, this week, it was when I stumbled over an apparently quite random quote from Aldous Huxley’s Island, his utopian counterpart to the much more famous Brave New World. The context isn’t all that important; what mattered at the time was that it seemed aimed at me with laserlike precision, finely honed to pierce the sludge of my phone-addled thoughts:

“Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply….” I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you…. Lightly, my darling, lightly.

That’s right, I was already thinking, that’s somehow right, when the next day I came totally from nowhere upon this beautiful thread by the novelist Aaron Gwyn. It’s about how he spent his early 30s wracked with rage even though he had everything he thought he wanted. The whole thing is illuminating, but this is what hit me:

And this is when I did start to think, at least on the periphery, about politics. We’ve all just watched one man almost shot to death and another killed. We’ve probably watched it more than once. Heavy, heavy. Yet despite the gargantuan imagery that emerged from that moment and its boggling public consequence, I found myself more and more fixated on the human-sized reality. Underneath the looming drama there’s a little person of flesh and blood who came within a whisper of death.

Leaving aside if you can whatever you may think of him, the man has just been through what would be, for anyone, a profound experience. And at least in this moment he is walking around with a look on his face that I can only describe as peaceful. Shelving all the fanfare and spectacle for a moment, I was put almost inescapably in mind of a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother on the way to a prison camp, when he had just barely missed being publicly executed:

Brother! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. There will be people near me, and to be a man among people and remain a man forever, not to be downhearted nor to fall in whatever misfortunes may befall me—this is life; this is the task of life. I have realized this. This idea has entered into my flesh and into my blood.

Seconds away from death, facing down years of exile and servitude, and somehow he had been set enduringly free. Lightly, my darling, lightly: at the very edge of the void, where the cold of it is so close it chills the skin of your face, some unseen hand stretches out to lift the whole burden of life from weary human shoulders.

I can’t pretend to explain it. But it makes a heart-deep kind of sense to me. And maybe you don’t really need explanations when you’re down in the muck and the slime: you need that strange and improbable burst of light from the upper air. Job doesn’t need comforters telling him to feel better. He needs a voice from heaven, telling him to keep silent and listen. And in the dark you may hear the distant footfalls of one who brings good news—running gladly, lightly.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:

Image: Zakiblida2012, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons