News Reporter: Act Four: Driving the dark away at the end of a hard year

Friday 30 December 2016

Act Four: Driving the dark away at the end of a hard year

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

The central part of the Milky Way. (Agence France-Presse/European Southern Observatory/D. Minniti)

Every year at Thanksgiving, my family reads the late Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross’s 1936 Thanksgiving proclamation, which includes a line about how we have arrived “by a way that we did not know to the end of another year.” I’ve thought about that passage frequently as 2016 has wound down to a close. This has been a year that brought us an entirely implausible presidential election, the deaths of essential artists gone shockingly, all too soon, and just when we needed them most, and catastrophe abroad. What are we to make of this year? What awaits us in the year to come?

Most end-of-the-year celebrations aren’t really built to acknowledge the fear that sometimes creeps in with the chill in the dead of winter. They’re about the miracles that keep lights burning, or the gift of salvation showing up in an unexpected place, or the pride of a community in its accomplishments, or about making resolutions that rush us into the new year. And it’s for that reason that I love Susan Cooper’s poem, “The Shortest Day,” written for the Christmas Revels, which recognizes both the loss as a year ends and our own role in bringing the light back into the world. Cooper writes:

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us — listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

“And dearly love their friends / And hope for peace” seem to me to be the operative words this year. We may not be able to take action on our own that transforms the world, but we can all work harder to make our immediate circles and our communities better, stronger places. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to rededicate ourselves to driving the dark away and waking promise in the sleeping land. We shouldn’t mistake the limits of our abilities for powerlessness.

As we head forward into 2017 and all the challenges it presents, I want to thank all of you for being such wonderful readers and friends. Corresponding with all of you, and visiting in our weekly chats is a great joy and good fortune. Act Four returns on Jan. 3, and the Act Four Live Chat returns on Jan. 9.

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