Everything Has Its Opposite. What’s Ahead for Us?

This column falls in the category of take it where you find it. It arises from my dread of being part of readers’ doom scrolling. I’d like to be of help. I don’t want to dig the dark hole any deeper.

As luck would have it, last week I found myself in possession of Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Sebastian Smee’s fascinating book “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism.” And then I discovered on my shelves a tattered copy of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

Leafing through that old treasure, I came upon Campbell’s description of the “monster tyrant.” It’s pretty much a perfect depiction of the present moment in American politics. Except with us, it’s not a single monster but a whole oligarchic class of them. Each one of them is a “hoarder of the general benefit,” Campbell would say. “The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and to his world — no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper…. [He] is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though in his own mind he may entertain himself with humane intentions.”       

Millions upon millions of us know this class of American monsters is accruing vast wealth to itself while vivisecting the federal establishment and denying the rest of us not only safety, equal opportunity and emergency relief, but what decent pleasure government can give us in the form of national parks, monuments and nature preserves, now virtually denuded of professional staff.

It’s all too much. We really shouldn’t dwell on it any more than we absolutely have to. Sabastian Smee gives us another vision, a vision of the inspiring enthusiasm and ardent appreciation of the miracle of life and the light that makes it possible.

Smee contends that between 1870-1871, what Victor Hugo called “The Terrible Year,” the glorious liberating spirit of the Impressionist movement emerged like a new dawn from the long winter siege of Paris by the Germans and the burning of the central city, including the Louvre and the Tuileries, during the “Bloody Week” of the brutal suppression of the Paris commune, a revolutionary socialist government that ruled France for three months after the authoritarian Napoleon III was deposed when the French lost the Franco-Prussian war.

When I think of 2025, our “terrible year” and the next three terrible years ahead, I’m reminded of horrible times in Paris, and thank our lucky stars that Americans aren’t shooting each other quite yet. Most heartening of all is Smee’s detailed rendering of the empowering possibilities when history reverses itself, and the pendulum of fortune begins to swing the other way. He shows us how painters such as Morisot, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Bazille and Cezanne refused to paint depictions of the Terrible Year, unwilling to put their creative genius to giving the monsters more power than they already had. The impressionists wanted to paint a new world, a landscape of brilliant new potential, without actually depicting it by descending into fantasy. They saw the world around them, the natural world and the world of pleasures and kindnesses, slight or marvelous, as the harbinger of a new life free of terror and filled with hope.

Smee writes that the “terrible year” put everyone in France “under tremendous strain,” particularly their sense of “innocence” when it came to “political clarity,” which created in turn a “profound sense of precariousness” and “existential fragility.” How familiar that all sounds.

If the laws of duality hold true, as they always have, the opposite of now in some form, creative and political, must eventually replace the miseries that engulf us now. Who knows if a new artistic, or musical, or poetic revolution will emerge from this shameful darkness, a creative effulgence that fills everyone with delight and relief and renewed energy to recreate the devastated world that’s left to them. Who knows if a renaissance in social responsibility and the milk of human kindness will flower forth to lift people’s spirits, feed their bodies, help them care for their children, and lay the ground work for a new empathetic world of compassion and generosity.

It won’t be “new impressionism” per se, but I’m sure the profound consistency of the beauty of an evolving natural world will have something to do with it. We might even see the reemergence of a kind of magnanimous, good-hearted stewardship of our environment that helps us cope with and even mitigate the devastations of climate change. Maybe the “self-evident” promises of the Declaration of Independence will come magically alive again and light the way to a new world of contentment and creativity. Who knows?

It may take longer that we hope. And whatever gift comes our way may not, like impressionism, be a pragmatic political reaction. Chances are it will be an uplifting and an empowering of the disempowered much like what began in the 1960s with civil rights, voting rights and the rights of women. One thing is certain, if a negative reaction like MAGAism can emerge from a period of liberation like that of the ‘60s, an alternative, life-affirming reaction can also emerge from a period of oppression in America like it did in Paris in the 1870s and countless other places in other times the world over.

Who knows? Spring is the great teacher. And we have no other choice but to believe her and aid her in every way we can. We don’t want to waste another moment on despair.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

NOTE:  Seeking personal renewal, I’ll be taking off for a Spring break after this week. I’ll be back again when the garden’s planted, the herbs are by the kitchen window and the flowerpots are filled. Thanks for your patience and your interest.