When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.