Lit Windows

In late January this year, for no particular reason, I decided to put together a new column for the Hamilton Review of Books. It’s called Lit Windows and the idea behind it came from a social media post by author Lauren B. Davis, who shared a lovely piece of writing that she said gave her hope from the first time since the US presidential election in November 2024. One of the images in that piece of writing that stayed with me was one of lit windows, which were depicted as a beacon for the narrator in a dark night. I love the idea of writing creating these lit windows, things to reach for or look towards in times of struggle and so I asked people to share with me some pieces of writing that helped them in some way through dark times. I’ll share some of the shorter responses I received here, and then follow up with a longer look at two wonderful poems from the award-winning author Gary Barwin.

Rebecca Clifford wrote that the book that leapt to mind for her was Phillipa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden. She added, “Whenever I think things are impossible this lovely children's story brings me back to the positive.”

Lee Allen commented that she recommended Alexander McCall Smith's series the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency set in Botswana, Africa. She wrote: “I picked up one a couple of days ago when I couldn't stand to look at the news another day. In spite of the genre these books are all about treating people kindly, about considering others, about loving the land they live on.”

Children’s author Aimee Reid shared that she “Treasures the middle grade novel Okay For Now by Gary Schmidt. Gary’s writing immerses us in the narrator’s point of view so thoroughly that we can feel our hearts expand with possibility and hope as the narrator sees beyond his father’s twisted perspective and encounters new – good, kind – people in the small town where his family has moved.

And Jeffrey Luscombe shared two pieces of writing that give him hope: “1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. Not the novels themselves but the appendix at end of 1984, “The Principles of Newspeak” and the epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale. Both show that the totalitarian regimes have fallen and are written about in retrospect. And they are never discussed.”

Gary Barwin

STILL AHEAD SOMEHOW: Two poems which help.

Would you say that things are unsettled and turbulent? Um, yeah. Things are unsettled and turbulent and I’ve been wondering what to do. Go to Mars? No, it’s soon going to be crowded with tech bros and/or fascists. Should I seek “the peace of wild things” (as Wendell Berry phrases it)? Absolutely. Going into the woods. Contemplating the earth and the greater universe that contains the earth. But when I think “wild things,” I also think of Lou Reed’s “wild side,” and the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” and Maurice Sendak’s “wild things.” We can find peace (and sustenance and community and consolation) in wildness. In listening and reading and looking at wildly creative things. Like, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” we can be succoured by that human making and being that refuses to passively accept lousiness and pernicious hierarchies and persecution.

I heard a local rabbi say that he often thinks of the passage in Genesis where it says at the end of six days of creation, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” And, the rabbi says he remembers that despite everything, it all is still good. That’s kind of a lovely thought. Though, I must say, it’s good to get some help in remembering this.

So, lately, I’ve been really considering how much I value writing that values this peaceable wildness, this green fuse, this subversive joy.

Take A.R. Ammons’ beautiful lyric:

Reading
It’s nice
after dinner
to walk down
to the beach
and find
the biggest thing
on earth
relatively calm.

There’s so much to say about it. I love the understated “relatively calm”– there’s not a total “peace of wild things,” there’s only relative calm. How I can relate to that! And the simple pleasure of strolling after dinner to look at the sea. Dinner! Such simple joy. Strolling! Yes! And to feel some of that settling sympathetic magic of a non-stormy sea. And what of the title, “Reading”? Is the poet reading the water? Is reading like seeing the biggest thing on earth and feeling “relatively calm” because we’re immersed in something so much bigger than ourselves, a slow-moving undulation that has gone on since almost the beginning of our planet?

But how to go on? (“I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on.”) Langston Hughes’ remarkable “Island,” offers some suggestions. These days, it’s unlikely that I’ll be fuelled by gales of “fun-wow,” because I am feeling more circumspect, more compassionate, so Hughes’ conception of the power of sorrow to affect change, to motivate, to be a buoying force of hope is really helpful. I suppose if you have no sorrow, you’ve given up, you don’t remember things as they were or imagine they could be otherwise. We feel fellow-feeling and compassion in Hughes’ identification of our sorrow.

Island
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

I want to go to Hughes’ island. I can see it because he reminds me in this poem, with its quiet beautiful rhymes (sorrow/now/somehow, fair/there), the subtle perfection of its rhythm and repetitions (“wave of sorrow” comes back as a sorrowful wave throughout the poem) and how the poem is finally still with “take me there,” as if anticipating arriving at the fair-sanded island.

These two poems are calm seas for me. Islands that the reassuring roll of the waves take me to. Small life rafts in the raging shitstorm that is much of the current moment.

Bright works for dark times

Gary Barwin