“What’s wrong?”

“The world is evil.”

“You’ve got me.”

“Of course. But how do you rejoice?”

The foregoing is an exact transcription of a recent connubial colloquy, eavesdropped as it were. The first speaker, the wife, is concerned by her husband’s listless taciturnity. He’s there but not really. Nothing’s wrong, in a diagnosable sense, but everything is.

The husband, somewhat comically, has his head in the clouds – who says things like “the world is evil”? – Hamlet and who else? His abstract disappointments seem to cancel his present good fortune. Hasn’t he his health, chance, family, passions, a sufficiency? Hasn’t he – as his wife points out – his loving bride? His pewling pollutes the moment they share, a culpable offense. “How do you rejoice?” he groans theatrically. Yet he can’t evict himself from his despair. He’s stuck in dread.

While the couple must remain anonymous, their name, I suspect, is legion. Many nowadays mope in private, while keeping up appearances with acquaintances. Parents of a kidnapped child must feel this way. Yes, they have other children – and health, chance, sufficiency, each other – but their whole concern is the love they’ve lost. As in a body, the blood flows to the wound. Nothing else matters but that.

Joy and sorrow aren’t responses we can dictate but organisms with lives of their own, whose activities evade analysis. They remind me of dog-pal Henry, frisky and affectionate one moment, suspicious and stand-offish the next – and nothing’s changed. “The heart has its reasons,” said Pascal, “which reason knows nothing of.”

Reason bids me to buck up – for all sorts of reasons. Like the husband in the foregoing exchange, I know what I should be doing – for myself, wife, productivity, mental health – mop my tears and get on with being. In the lamentably unforgettable lyric of Johnny Mercer,

I know this. But my spirit keeps carping, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

The ostrich option, while tempting, must be eschewed while the battle rages. That America is losing does not mean we’ve lost. Never say die, while you can still speak. Tides turn.

Neither, if we can help it, should we take a pill or glug a snootful to erase the horror. “Wake me when it’s over” is to betray those we care about.

Neither should we wallow in “unmanly grief”. Weep if you must but then get on with it. “The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” (Shakespeare, we know without being told, spent many long nights grieving.)

I am drawn, during this abysmal hour, to heroes – folks who dare all and insist on hope. It takes great crises to make great leaders – so now’s the time. I warm myself in the glow of Jamie Raskin’s and ’s defiance, for example, and in the crackling fury of ’s and ’s prose. Now is not the moment for temperate speech, both sides-ism, kvetching. Fire must be fought with fire. We can qualify and temporize when the shooting stops.

The coming months – maybe years – will be hard. We must prepare. In a battle to the death, one or the other must die. When Tyranny savages Democracy, there is no meeting in the middle. This war can only end with one side in power and the other in chains or exile. The die has been cast.

The husband, cited above, must recast himself as a cheerful warrior. I keep telling him that.