Written by Rachel Hadas and Narrated by Marie T. Russell.
Patience is wearing thin. Not only are we all bone-weary of the pandemic; rising hopes have made the current precarious state of confusion and fear, vigorous variants and stubborn vaccine rejection all the more frustrating.
We thought we were almost out of the woods, but there’s no clear end in sight to this forest. And there’s no shortage of other bad and worsening news too, notably the dramatic daily evidence of the catastrophic results of climate change.
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
The same ways human beings always have adapted – grudgingly or stoically, fearfully or fatalistically or frantically. We’re in a prolonged period of maddeningly, scarily bad news – and if we follow the 24-hour news cycle, we’re in it up to our chins.
But how good has the news ever been? Precisely when or what was the Golden Age? Poet Randall Jarrell wrote, with tongue in cheek, that it’s when people went around complaining how yellow everything looked.
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Music By Caffeine Creek Band, Pixabay
Narrated by Marie T. Russell, InnerSelf.com
Rachel Hadas studied classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton. Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of Rutgers University - Newark, and has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and translations. A memoir about her husband's illness, "Strange Relation," was published by Paul Dry Books in 2011. Her previous book of poems, "The Golden Road," was published by Northwestern University Press in the fall of 2012.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.