Walks with Beauty

Do we not at times, looking back on periods in our life when we felt lost and confused, recognize sense emerging from nonsense, meaning emerging from what had felt meaningless? Think back to the weeks, months, maybe even years when it felt we were wandering, squandering, floundering. No waste feels greater than time and effort spent forging a path that ends in a blind alley. How could we have been so clueless? Why didn’t we listen to our own misgivings or that cautionary advice from others? What jackasses for not knowing better, and now having nothing to show for it. Or so it has seemed.

There were superficial reasons—when he thundered on the political scene at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and then rode on the wave of that thunder to his election in 2008—to compare Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. There was the Illinois connection, for instance, and the gifted orator connection, and the “new birth of freedom” connection. Add to these the evident high esteem, even reverence, held by Obama for that towering mentor of his spirit, and it is easy to link the two of them. But what about things deeper than the surface?

Recently I attended a Hollins University Theatre adaptation of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of this stellar literary achievement earning Dillard the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. How, in any adequate fashion, a record of impressionistic observations and musings without a story line could be adapted to the stage intrigued everyone, I suspect, who came to see it. That I came twice within the span of four days tells you I felt the effort wonderfully successful for giving the audience a true “feel” for the book.

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?...

Imagine a young Will Shakespeare, in the middle of Romeo and Juliet, taking a break to honor an intimation that a sonnet wanted to be born. More likely, from the depth and breadth of what was about to pour from his pen, it was a William Shakespeare more seasoned by life’s buffetings, perhaps pausing from his swansong in The Tempest to give wings again to his heart. Whether a pining Romeo or an aging Prospero, the Immortal Bard began his great love song of redemption in darkness.