In year of stress, seek the peace of wild things

A big drainage canal runs behind my office — a wide channel, lined with concrete, that takes away the neighborhood’s rain. Though the canal does important work, few would consider it an appealing landmark. Chain-link fences line both banks, telling the world to stay away. On most days, it’s a message I easily oblige. For much of the year, as I walk through our office parking lot, the canal is far from mind. But one recent evening, as I headed to my car at the end of a workday, a white flash, vivid as lightning, caught the corner of my eye. Tracing the flash to its source, I discovered that four egrets had flown into the canal to look for dinner. About egrets, you already know. They’re tall, white birds, elegant as a length of calligraphy, and fairly common even in Louisiana’s cities, where they’ve adapted by hunting in canals and roadside ditches. I stood by the fence and watched the egrets for a few moments as they combed the canal for prey — maybe a tiny fish or two, or some frogs to make a meal. As somber as poets pecking at their keyboards, the egrets stooped over the shallow residue of a recent storm, stabbing the water occasionally as they found their quarry. It did me good to see them, and so I've made a habit of stopping by the fence before and after I start my work shift, hoping to spot the egrets again. We’ve been connecting about twice a week, their presence so routine that my heart sank a bit when just three of the egrets appeared one evening. Had the fourth bird met a bad end? He was back for the next visit, though, the quartet now complete. I was pleased to see this tiny part of my life once again made whole. You might wonder why, in a world so harried and frayed this autumn, a grown man would be making appointments with egrets. Wendell Berry, a writer I love, explained it much better than I ever could in one of his best poems, “The Peace of Wild Things.” “When despair for the world grows in me,” he tells readers, “and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” In seeing creatures unworried by humanity’s cares, Berry suggests, we can get out of ourselves for a while. It’s something many of us have needed in this broken time. “I come into the peace of wild things,” he writes, “who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” I watch egrets, I suppose, because in this wounded year, peace of any kind is a gift too precious to ignore. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/entertainment_life/danny_heitman/article_b2d5c9a2-1f9f-11eb-838c-6736e20f6ebf.html

In Biden victory, a cast change: Out with Richard III, in with Atticus Finch

As Joe Biden jogged onto that outdoor platform in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday night, one sensed a cast change on the national stage of seismic proportions. Exit Richard III. Enter Atticus Finch. It’s not mere hype or sentimentality to propose that the victorious Biden cut a figure akin to the kind, purposeful character Harper Lee created and Aaron Sorkin reinvigorated on Broadway in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In the conciliatory tones of his maiden speech as president-elect, Biden made a pitch to our better natures in a manner that reverberated with Finch-like magnanimity and rectitude. “Now let’s give each other a chance,” Biden said Saturday — as if to quickly set aside the divisions Donald Trump sought to exploit over the length of his desultory tenure. “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. . . . This is the time to heal in America. To marshal the forces of decency, fairness, science and hope.” You might forgive a drama-deprived theater critic for looking to his field of coverage, shut down by covid-19, for analogies that help frame these preliminary performances of our next president and vice president, Kamala D. Harris. Her elevation, too, as the first woman of color elected to the second highest of offices, conveyed intimations of “Mockingbird,” one of the most widely read novels in America. Here, one imagines the fulfilled dreams of Calpurnia, the indomitable Black housekeeper in Atticus’s Maycomb, Ala., home, a woman of keen insight for whom opportunity was frustratingly denied. In her remarks Saturday, Harris exuberantly invoked the women who came before her, women of more accomplishment than Calpurnia but none with more of a thirst for justice. Biden is not a great orator; it may be that his lifelong struggle with a stutter precludes that possibility. (For a harrowing reminder of how anguishing a hurdle that can be for a person in the public eye, re-watch Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning performance in “The King’s Speech.”) But his remarks over the blaring of the car horns and cheers of supporters in the Delaware parking lot pointed to more substantive values, and to a man of heart and spirit. More than a year ago, when I followed him around Iowa for a story about his performative campaigning style, I sensed a man adrift — a Willy Loman on the road, desperately trying to make a sale. In Delaware, on home turf, fresh from an election called in his favor, he seemed stronger, more resolute, a winner nationally in his own right, a man as secure in his convictions as Atticus Finch himself. The references to a book and play about a White lawyer who, in the Jim Crow South of 1934 defends a Black man falsely accused of rape, might strike some as dated: The story by contemporary standards displays some patronizing whiffs of White liberalism swooping in to save the day. But the parallels go beyond that trope, to other qualities that Atticus embodies, and that Biden reminds us of. Like Atticus, for instance, he is a devoted family man, widowed at an early age and compelled to raise children on his own. (Atticus, alas, doesn’t find a Dr. Jill.) The message of tolerance Biden delivers could come straight from Atticus, who is also a politician, by the way: He’s an Alabama state legislator at the time he’s defending Tom Robinson, the laborer railroaded by a racist and a system lined up against him. It happens to be the opposite of the inflammatory rhetoric of the figure America is tossing out of office. Remember the inaugural address invoking “American carnage”? In the aftermath of such polarizing language, though, there may be a naivete — however noble — in believing common ground is achievable. Biden underlined this Saturday by reaching out to Trump supporters, insisting he will be a president “who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.” That notion is also central to “Mockingbird.” During Biden’s speech, I was compelled to reflect on a debate at the heart of Sorkin’s adaptation, as Calpurnia confronts Atticus over his insistence that his children show their racist neighbors — and even Bob Ewell, the vicious sexual predator who sets Tom Robinson’s tragedy in motion — courtesy and respect. “What is the virtue of teaching Jem and Scout that Bob Ewell should be treated with respect?” Calpurnia demands of Atticus. “Virtue,” Atticus replies. “The virtue is that it’s virtuous.” “I don’t know what that means,” Calpurnia says. “It means,” Atticus tells her, “I don’t want them hating people they disagree with.” Calpurnia’s rejoinder taunts Atticus with his own words. “ ‘You gotta give Maycomb time, Cal. This is the Deep South, you gotta give ’em time,’ ” she says. “How much time,” she adds bitterly, “would Maycomb like?” The terrible ending for Tom Robinson in “Mockingbird” suggests Maycomb isn’t nearly ready in 1934. But Atticus, like Biden, won’t let go of his faith in what’s to come. The play comes to an end soon after Atticus enumerates for Calpurnia a short list of local people they can count on, to push for a better day. “Smaller armies have changed the world,” Atticus says. “Joy cometh in the morning, Cal.” Maybe, just maybe, it does. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/biden-victory-speech-atticus-finch/2020/11/09/e5f36976-21d8-11eb-952e-0c475972cfc0_story.html

Halloween Pandemic 2020