Sometimes I feel at peace with the world and hopeful about the advance of civilization and the maturation of our children.
Other times I awake in the middle of the night feeling irremediably isolated and profoundly alone. While the local school still produces high school musicals they only touch the most popular ones, the ones which are cycled through all the local high schools, the ones not too difficult to understand, to cast, to memorize. Certainly no deep or dramatic offerings, nothing which requires actors who empathize and emote. Most commonly the plays on offer are takeoffs of plays which used to be performed; you may see "The Lightning Thief" or (if you still travel) "Ibsen's Ghost". When I am depressed I despair of ever seeing "The Wild Duck" on stage. If I can find no one with whom to share 4 minutes of conversation on "Peer Gynt", how am I connected to the rest of the world?
In such despair I am sucked into Charybdis, taking note perhaps of how rare is a conversation about Elisha's relationship with the wealthy widow and her teenage son, how much rarer still one about the Left-handed and Right-handed twins. (I write these miniature essays for my own old age: Who else will pick up the thread of my thoughts?)
I am not asking for a program nor a study; not necessarily for a performance -- where everyone sits alone in the dark anyway -- but only for a conversation in a sunny room or an offhand email arriving unexpectedly to assure me that culture and intelligence is not yet utterly lost.
Eventually the night will pass; so too the approaching storms. With them usually depart the overwhelming sense of crumbling civilization; with the light often return the faint hope a newly published translation of The Iliad means we may be able to scrape by one more time if only by the skin of our teeth.
For the present hour darkness still holds sway and I recall we are living through an election year and perhaps hope is more the illusion than is the depair.
TROLL KING: What's the difference between a troll and a man?
PEER GYNT: No difference, so far as I can see. Big trolls roast you, and little trolls claw -- Same as with us, when our feelings show.
TROLL KING: Yes, there and in other points, we agree. But morning is morning and night is night, And there is a difference down at the root. I'll tell you what it is. Outside, Among men, under the shining sky, They say: "Man, to yourself be true!" While here, under our mountain roof, We say, "Troll, to yourself be -- enough!"