"The Light in the Dark" by Horatio Clare

There is ample testimonial to the healing power of nature, of the positive effects of allying ourselves with the universe beyond the maelstrom of human chaos.  Henry David Thoreau attested to this power.  John Muir believed that to go to the beauty of Yosemite brought healing without the necessity of drugs and doctors.  Horatio Clare, in his book The Light in the Dark:  A Winter Journal (Elliott & Thompson, 2018) adds his voice to the testimonials that an immersion in the natural world can bring healing and redemption.  In his case, he suffers bouts of intense depression that impact his wife and children as well as his working life as a writer. He perseveres in poetic melancholy, finding joy and transcendence in the wilds of Yorkshire.

From the start, Clare commits himself to experiencing winter, its weight and its darkness, in an effort to face down the black dog that follows him incessantly.  He believes winter and nature can heal him.  “I will not lose touch with nature,” he writes.  “This is vital.  I believe in immanence, in the oneness of living things.”  Therefore, staying true to the essence of nature will get him through these most difficult times.

Clare’s depression deprives him of his livelihood.  He cannot write, and therefore, he cannot feed his family.  Although he has many books under his name and has spent years as a professional writer, money is tight and he feels guilty when the family must rely solely on the income of his wife who is a teacher.  He feels he is not keeping up his end of the bargain.  This circular situation only feeds the beast of his depressive mind.

To free himself, he walks the Yorkshire landscape.  He revels in the birds and livestock and daily existence of Northern England, a place of profound beauty and ancient history.  “In turmoil we are drawn to water,” he writes, “to space, to the high places and the wider views.  It must be a very simple reflex:  a need for escape and perspective which weather and landscape fulfil.”

For much of the book, though, it is a constant struggle to support his family, even though he has made money.  He worries about making his tax payments in January and overspending at Christmas.  As the bills pile up, he feels foolish because he has put off the reckoning and now he must pay.  Ironically, he notes that there is more to Christmas than gifts and expenditures.  He tells us that Christmas used to be a pagan celebration, “a festival of light in the darkness, renewal and birth in the death of the year.”  The book is about light and dark but it is really something deeper, a man looking to free himself from the darkness that steals his equilibrium, and instead recover the warmth and joy he finds in his children and wife and their lives together.  That is the light in the dark.

His son, Aubrey, plays an important role in the book.  Clare often sees the world through the eyes of the child, and this helps to restore his balance.  He worries about his effect on all of his family members.  “It is dreadful to live with the depressed,” he writes, but he admires his wife, Rebecca, who manages to make do despite his shifting moods.  She teaches online high school students in the Classics and English, and her boundless energy to meet the needs of family, her students, and her own intellect is astounding.  She is also an auto-didactic, never giving up her own desire to keep learning.

Clare quite powerfully frames his depression in many apt descriptions and adjectives.  He conveys the relentlessness of the disease, the way he can be euphoric and immensely sad in the same moment.  Just when he thinks he has freed himself, the “ghastly ball of negativity” returns like a ball and chain.  “It is like being stalked by a ghoul,” he writes.  His salvation comes from turning his gaze outward.  “You do not matter,” he writes to himself in his journal, “other people matter, the land matters, the sky and the world.”  He longs to get out of his own way.

His vision here is one of clarity and devoid of self-pity.  He knows doctors will prescribe anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs.  He wants to beat his depression without a crutch or pharmaceutical assistance.  He knows from research that writers often lose when they turn to doctors and chemicals to fight the disease.  Clare is worried he will lose his ability to write permanently and will not be able to help his family.  In a powerful statement late in the book, he believes in storytelling as “a mechanism for the working-out and working-through…the difficulties and trials of life.”  So he endeavors to work through this dark winter to greet the spring.

Horatio Clare is a gifted and poetic writer who makes a personal struggle universal.  This book is not plagued by narcissism or self-absorption; by looking in he also looks out—to his family, to nature, to the beautiful rural landscape in which he lives.  It is a deep and abiding message he has for us, his readers.  In poetry and life, we find ourselves and we restore our balance.  This is the mystery of the natural world, its healing, and its grace.