I took a walk to figure out how to be.

Henry and I invited Trollope to join us, as presented by the incomparable Timothy West. West is magically Trollope in one’s EarPods, if Trollope could have acted the voice he composed. I’ve now re-read all six of the Palliser series and four of the six Barsetshire novels – something like two-hundred-and-fifty hours’ worth – if you call listening reading. I don’t. Reading one ponders, stages the drama in one’s mind, savors, refers, compares, underscores, asterisks, remarks. It’s work. Listening one relaxes, heeds not to lose track. If a thought occurs, you’ve no time to jot it, even if you’ve pen and paper handy. As a reader I’m re-creator, as a listener a recreationist, both pleasurable but different.

Trollope abducts me from our doleful hour back to an England delighted with its mastery of earth, brimming with the overconfidence that permits self-deprecation. Self-satire is a privilege of the satisfied: for all our flaws and foibles, we remain lovable. Insecurity resents mockery. Tell me I’m stupid, I smile; tell me I’m fat, I wince – NOT FUNNY!

How to be in this crazy time is no laughing matter. Wailing, clowning, raging, stiff-upper-lip? Devil-may-care or damn-the-devil? Discussions of our civil war are exhausting, excruciating – I clap my ears! – but how can we talk of anything else? I’m wary of wearing you out with caterwauling. A good friend said he agreed with me, enjoyed my writing, but couldn’t read me, my grief was more than he could bear. Sometimes I can’t read myself. But how can we look away? It’s like attending the execution of a loved one. You can’t stand being there and you can’t be anywhere else.

The demolition of the White House hounds, haunts. This is MY house! The cheesy ostentation of Mar-a-Lago gives me the creeps. Tyrants worldwide share the same execrable gaudy taste, as Krugman points out. The White House was so pretty, modest, and now we’ll be afflicted with this monstrosity, until his successor (assuming he permits one) orders it destroyed. What a waste! Affront! Assault on my sensibilities and the nation we purportedly share! But what use fulminating?

Never have I felt so wobbly. I grew up in confidence – overconfidence – able to chuckle at myself. The America of my decades was as smugly self-assured as Trollope’s England. Sure, we were fallible, but for all our flaws and foibles, we were lovable. Now we are vile. Despicable. Humiliating. I don’t want to be an American – and can’t be anyone else.

How then to be? Sackcloth and ashes or rabidly defiant? Encouraging or commiserating? Defensive or dismissive? Are my forays into literature or Henry’s blabbing merciful diversions or culpable derelictions? Is it OK to be reading Trollope?

I’d like to be hopeful – only that would be dishonest. We are in the shitter, with worse to come. Recovery, if we live that long, will be fractious, anguished. The hate in my heart is permanent, though I train myself to be polite.

My guidance to myself is a bromide: lament where you must, rejoice where you can – and always try to tell the truth. I rejoice in those I love and our little sodality. I rejoice in Henry, Trollope, language, Timothy West, nature, beauty. I rejoice to learn who we really are, however disillusioning. Our story engrosses, even as it mortifies. I am glad to be alive.

I do not know how to be during this tortuous time, but I know it is better together. Lamentation is an ancient literary form, which soothes the soul.