It's that time again. The hours of daylight, unnoticeably, are getting longer, but the human feeling is of entering the worst of winter, and spring seems far away. And with all that, we are approaching the anniversary of the "saddest day of the year."
This event need not be as miserable as it sounds. It's an opportunity, as my Herald Tribune article suggests (see link above), to bask in some of the most beautiful love poetry of the creative soul from cultures all around the world.
Sadness and the human spirit are perpetual companions. Some have proposed that this nostalgic resonance that we all feel has a legendary source in the banishment from the Garden of Eden. There was a glory that we once knew, and "all our journeying", as T.S. Eliot put it, is to recover the lost paradise that was our beginning.
We find the same nostalgia for "recollection" at the heart of Romantic poetry and painting in the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality - "trailing clouds of glory do we come" - to the soulful mystery of Sehnsucht and Erinnerung pervading German art. That urge to recall, with a sense of "insatiable longing" that tells us we are not complete, are the very foundation of sadness.
But letting sadness go by without being drawn into it to the exclusion of all else, will keep us going till spring. Here, too, as my article points out, the Chinese still have the last word, with their sensible proverb, "You can't stop birds of sadness flying over you, but don't let them nest in your hair."
CJM
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