Reading Matters
“On a darkling plain”: Helping adolescents deal with uncertainty in C-19 times
I believe that the study of History should be compulsory. We seem to learn, albeit slowly, from mistakes and History allows us to see “the long view” of how societies operate. Have you ever had someone assert, “Things were better in my day (or the good old days)”. On face value there is much in the modern world of which to be fearful…but hasn’t this always been so?
The Medieval period or Middle Ages has always held a fascination. Many years ago I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Between 1300-1399, the human race (well, Europe anyway) faced extinction from The Black Death and war raged almost continually for a century (The 100 Years War). Tuchman sardonically commented on the blood sports of the time involving young males with hands tied behind backs seeking to kill animals using their heads. Gross beyond measure? Think of some things that pass for entertainment today.
Nature was then seen as a mysterious entity that proceeded in its own right. The Romantic period that followed saw Nature imbued with a voice of its own. It spoke to humans and even meted out punishment as was shown in the Ancient Mariner killing the albatross. These poets were artists of certainty, there were answers out in the countryside. A little later, because of war and industrialisation, Nature (and God) became silent. No longer could Wordsworth hear nature in “the loud, dry wind”.
It was left to poets like Matthew Arnold to find answers in the silence, to try to make sense of change and the loss of faith in living. In the wonderful “Dover Beach”, the poet meditates on his own times:
“The world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so
Hath neither certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
He wrote these dour thoughts on his honeymoon! But doesn’t he mirror the zeitgeist of our own C-19 riddled 2020?
Teenagers worry about the state of the world, their parents’ health and their future. We must model optimism, re-assure them that it is a good world and that “the sun also rises and hastens back to the place where it arose”. The hope of tomorrow, if you will. A vaccine will come and, if we are all sensible, we will come out of this chastened but wiser perhaps.
And then there is the historical masterpiece The Autumn of the Middle Ages in which John Huizinga mused: ”When the world was half a thousand years younger all envisaged much sharper outlines…all things had about them something glitteringly cruel and public”. This could have been written at any time in the 21st Century! Social media despite its positive function can be deleterious in being a vehicle for vilification, trolling, traducing reputations and producing fake news. We live in a time of public confession, disclosure, of tribal judgement. Where is Arnold’s certitude when our lives are so dominated by the sound of an incoming text or Instagram?
Mankind has always lived on “a darkling plain” devoid of easily accessible answers with the world whelming around us. In his inimitable, succinct style, Arnold proposes the answer: “The Sea of Faith was once too, at the full…Ah, Love, let us be true to one another”.
When children are anxious, afraid, uncertain, the best antidote is love and comfort but then isn’t that true for the refugee, the disadvantaged, the elderly, the marginalised? Of all of us, really.
Let’s try to find meaning in the little, simple things of life: the walk with loved ones, reading, writing or other creative pursuits.
Paul Cullen
paul.cullen@cg.catholic.edu.au