“All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names.” – Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

GUILDENSTERN: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
ROSENCRANTZ: Or just as mad.
GUILDENSTERN: Or just as mad.
ROSENCRANTZ: And he does both.
GUILDENSTERN: So there you are.
ROSENCRANTZ: Stark raving sane

Sometimes it feels as though the world as we know it to be is at odds with the world as it is. Our sense of what is real about the world around us and the world far away — of the lives of people we’ll meet and people we’ll never meet — seems fragile, glancing. It’s so easily knocked askew, and sometimes you catch a glimpse of shadows moving through the rift. Here now, then gone. For some reason, inexplicable to me, the change in season can magnify this feeling, the slow sudden shift from fall to winter, the dizzying feeling that everything was green and light a minute ago, and now it’s all black bare branches and soft grey-upon-grey skies, and the discordance between the warmth from within houses and the pale cold world without. It creates a fissure of the emotions or the understanding; it’s difficult to distinguish which.

It’s as though you’re walking down an alley at dusk, and the sky above you is lighter than the dusty, shadowed houses and streets all around you, but the light is dying and the air is cooling. As lights go on in windows that you pass, the warmth of that light is bewildering, and the movement of people in and out of rooms, in and out of your vision, is not something you can read or follow. It’s an Ozu alleyway, with glimpses of other peoples’ lives: Laundry hanging, full trains passing to a faraway station, people walking with purpose to a place we will never know, passing us by. A Kafka alleyway, with men in shirtsleeves hanging out of their windows at close of day. Everything that made sense yesterday doesn’t make sense today, and might never make sense again.

It’s worse than ever for me at this time in our history, because there’s an exhausting, maddening, blatantly manufactured disconnect we face on a daily basis. We’re told that peace has been brokered in a place where people are being killed every day, we’re told that prices are going down, but people are struggling to feed their families. We’re being told that everything is okay and things are getting better, but people are anxious, sick, hungry, unable to pay for food or care. People are being taken off the street and sent to a place they’ve never been, where we can’t follow, and they don’t know and we don’t know what will happen to them or if they’ll see their families, or feel the warmth of their homes, or even live. And the news is so tiring and we’re so powerless and so inundated with lies and the evil rot of deception, greed, and lack of empathy. You catch a glimpse of people through a half-lit window, and they’re passing into a dark cold room, out of your field of vision, you can’t follow them there, you can’t help them.

We’ve always had a network of myths and lies, news, propaganda that tell us the way that things are or should be or are supposed to be. That we should believe they are. Part of this shining web of myths that sustains us but sometimes clouds our vision is the story that we are decent, kind people. That we value decency. From our birth as a nation, we’ve told ourselves that we valued freedom, equality, and justice. Sometimes it has felt like we do. Sometimes it has felt like we’re working towards that. Often we have failed miserably in attaining this ideal. At this moment in our history the failure is epic, evident, depressing. We don’t even pretend to admire decency and kindness. Now we have a man with the loudest voice in the world calling people ugly, stupid, and much worse. Proudly and publicly posting racist rants. All lies, bile, hatred, cruelty, hypocrisy, that surely nobody can believe but everybody seems to accept. It can be enough to make you feel like you’re going insane.

We have taken a wrong turn down a dark alley with no street lights, no warmth, no glow from windows, just rotting garbage piled in the shadows.

An alley is a communal space, a common space, a shared responsibility — a part of our lives and homes that we share with others. It’s this glimpse of the lives of our neighbors and the moments that our paths cross with theirs that remind us that we’re responsible for their happiness, too. We don’t have to understand how they live to care about them and to support them and to wish for their comfort. And part of the great disconnect is that day to day, people are kind, people are empathetic, people do support their neighbors and offer kindness to strangers, and they love to do so. This is the truth to hold onto when the lies and hatred wash over you in a numbing wave. This is the truth to mutter to ourselves and declare loudly to anyone who listens as we wander through darkening alleys at dusk, all of us stark raving sane.