"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.

Opportunity Knocks

With COVID-19 cases rising again across the country, in-class versus remote learning for fall at the university continues to be a fluid situation.  There are possibilities offered by distance learning that make this an exciting time despite some negative feedback from students.

When I spoke to students and asked them to evaluate how we finished the spring semester online, they identified several key issues they encountered.  Many did not have reliable Wi-Fi at home.  Those who did often had to share bandwidth among family members.  Younger siblings were doing their own digital learning through Zoom and other platforms; others were watching streaming services.  As we contemplate a new round of stimulus grants and other financial assistance, some of that money should be put to government subsidized, reliable internet access.  Every home should be wired for internet service.  This should be free for those with financial hardship and limited resources.

After issues with internet access, students complained that they lacked the discipline and motivation to be self-directed learners.  They are paying a lot for their education, and if they took out student loans, they will be paying far into the future.  Therefore, they must get the most for their money now, and that means making a schedule, buckling down, and getting with the program.  They should keep their three hours of class time every week sacrosanct and even if they do not have a physical class over Zoom, reserve that time for that class’ coursework.  They must also keep regular scheduled hours to work on independent study and coursework.  The bare minimum would be for every hour of class time, they should devote an additional hour to course work.  Three hours of class time equal at least three hours of independent study.  Some classes may require more, so students must be flexible and adjust their study schedule accordingly.

Students also expressed concern about connecting with fellow students and the instructor.  They said that remote learning often left them feeling out of touch.  When they were on campus for instruction, they could have study groups and interact with teachers and students to gain a better perspective in a particular course.  From a distance, that kind of interaction is not possible.  Again, this is a matter of making the effort.  Utilizing Zoom meetings should not be just something done for class time.  Students should form study groups over Zoom or one of the other meeting programs.  The student must make an effort; it is not something that will magically happen on its own.

One of the most frequently heard complaints about distance learning is that students do not have access to on-campus services.  This has taken the form of students requesting a tuition break, or even a refund because parents and students see online learning as less than on-campus classes.  However, the preparation for the instructor is the same, the time spent reading and commenting on student work is the same, and grading and communication all require the same time and energy commitment as remote instruction.

As for services, health centers and counseling services can be conducted through Telehealth or other such online options.  Students can access those services and others, including the Registrar’s Office, financial aid, and the business office online.  For library services, many books and resources materials are available online with a valid student identification.

It is time for students to take responsibility for their own learning, and that is the great opportunity of this situation.  For so long, the educational philosophy has been the sage on the stage and students as passive receivers of the knowledge.  Now, students must take control and be involved in their own learning.  It is no longer the sage on the stage but the guide on the side.  The teacher facilitates learning, guiding the student and offering advice.

How does this look in an average college classroom?  Well, for one, attendance should not be a problem.  Many of our students have a difficult time coming to campus because of traffic and inadequate public transportation.  Now the commute has been eliminated.  In many cases, the student can work at his or her own pace.  Resources and study aids can be transmitted electronically to students, thereby avoiding killing a lot of trees with numerous copies.  Over the learning platforms, teachers and students can share screens, and the dialogue in class can be made over into group interaction and discussion.  This is a struggle in the classroom for in-person courses, and will probably be a struggle in online learning.  However, this is the perfect opportunity to change that.  Contributing to the discussion and the class community is a necessity and should be considered part of the student’s grade for the course.

I continue to be optimistic about moving to more online learning.  Each class has its own difficulties and advantages, but it feels like we have been moving toward this long before COVID-19.  It is time to seize the day and really test what can be done in this new paradigm.  COVID-19 will be with us at least for the next academic year, but we can see this as a chance to revolutionize education.  Therefore, for students and teachers, it is imperative that we move forward and take this opportunity to revise education in America.

"Lyrical and Critical Essays" by Albert Camus

“Any philosophical system is, in the last analysis, a theory of language.  Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words.”

Albert Camus in Lyrical and Critical Essays

We are familiar with Albert Camus’ novels, including The Stranger and The Plague.  Critics believe his novels to be his greatest work worthy of a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  However, he was a formidable essayist as well, and this collection, Lyrical and Critical Essays (Vintage, 1970) demonstrates Camus’ range and use of language different from the spare prose of a novel like The Stranger.

Camus adopts the traditional definition of an essay as an attempt to evaluate ideas rooted in factual analysis and poetic imagery and experience.  In his introduction, Philip Thody writes that Camus explores, “within the context of his own immediate experience, the ideas of the absurdity of the world, the inevitability of death, and the importance of physical life…”

The strength of Camus’ work here is in the first half of the collection labeled as “Lyrical Essays.”  The pieces use memoir, reflection, and poetic language to convey meaning.  They are not aggressive thesis statements followed up with rigorous argument.  Many are simply meditations on a theme or images that coagulate together into impression.

We encounter on these pages a wiser writer, a man of experience in his native Algiers.  “There is no love of life without despair of life,” he writes.  “I had not yet been through years of real despair.  They came, and managed to destroy everything in me except an uncontrolled appetite for life.”  He goes on to say that “a time always comes in an artist’s life when he must take his bearings, draw closer to his own center, and then try to stay there.”

In these first essays, Camus gives us insight into his life experience, sometimes rendered in Zen-like koans:  “When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear.”  And, “I don’t know any longer whether I’m living or remembering.”  This shift between the real and the dreamed highlights the territory characters like Meursault inhabit in Camus’ novels.  Where Meursault is obtuse, insulated, unable to see his place in society until he commits murder and becomes hated and despised, in his essays, Camus is able to offer his own real life appreciation for the artist connected to human experience.

The second half of his essay collection includes criticism and literary essays.  In these pieces, Camus’ use of poetic language is often stunning.  When writing about Herman Melville, he characterizes the novel Moby Dick as “…this unwearying peregrination in the archipelago of dreams and bodies, on an ocean ‘whose every wave is a soul,’ this Odyssey beneath an empty sky, makes Melville the Homer of the Pacific.”  He breaks down the imagery, the symbolism, and offers potent adjectives to illuminate the ideas of the novel.  He comes to the conclusion that “Depths do indeed have their painful virtue, as did the unjust silence in which Melville lived and died, and the ancient ocean he unceasingly ploughed.  From their endless darkness he brought forth his works, those visages of foam and night, carved by waters, whose mysterious royalty has scarcely begun to shine upon us, though already they help us to emerge effortlessly from our continent of shadows to go down at last toward the sea, the light, and its secret.”  Through his poetic language, Camus brings the epic nature of Melville’s work to life, which of course is the job of any critic.  Camus excels at it.

He laces in cultural criticism reflecting the world in which he lives in his analysis of the literature.  He makes the statement that great periods of change in history often result in great art.  He writes that this flourishing of artistic culture comes “at moments when the lives of whole peoples are heavy both with glory and with menace, when the future is uncertain and the present dramatic.”  He could be talking here of COVID-19 America struggling with a pandemic and paroxysms of police brutality and racial hatred.  He offers philosophical insight in troubled times:  “Tragedy is born between light and darkness and rises from the struggle between them,”  he writes.  Camus anticipates the great art and wisdom inherent in the depths of tragedy and human experience.

Albert Camus is primarily a novelist.  His life intertwined with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was primarily a philosopher.  They are like mirror images of each other.  We read Camus to see philosophy in action—he states in several interviews attached at the end of this book that he believes in the importance of character and plot over espousing philosophical ideas.  However, those ideas are clearly present in his essays and his novels but never at the sacrifice of character or plot development.  His effort can be summed up with his own words:  “I have a sense of the sacred and I don’t believe in a future life, that’s all.”  Existentialist, nihilist, dreamer—Albert Camus is the mid-century poet of prose.

We Are Mere Shadows of the Things We Once Believed

John Martin's Illustrations for Paradise Lost

If you were to ask me

How are things since you’ve been gone,

I would answer, truthfully,

There is heat and dust and ignorance.

We have abandoned all our hopes

And now inhabit the castle of our fears.

We are mere shadows of the things

We once believed, hand over heart,

Pledging to an ideal

Rather than to people.

In the silence of the ominous night,

We hear the fire in the sky.

Bombs or bullets or flamethrowers

While on the blue glow of our screens

Observed through suburban windows

The talking heads tell us what to believe

And more importantly, who to trust.

Trust no one; better to sit in the dark

And watch the night unfold like summer jasmine

Hoping daylight will tell a different story.

And So We've Come To This

More and more these days,

I see your face staring out at me

From the shadowed darkness of the looking glass.

It’s me, not you,

Or you and not me.

It is, in truth, both of us together and apart, as we were in life.

Always, always the paradox:

So many things to tell you

But you did not understand them

During the Great War of Years;

How will you understand them now?

They are just echoes out there

In the black hole of space.

So now that all the talking is done,

And we have exceeded the limits of heart language,

We remain alone on our separate islands.

Do we wave across the water occasionally,

Just to let each of us know the other lives on?

No, we hold up our hands, palms to sky

To shield us from the burning sun of all eternity.