This morning, while drinking my coffee, I came across a pair of striking sentences by Henry James, written in a letter just days after the onset of World War I. “The tide that bore us along,” he lamented, “was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara. … It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”
No … not lamented. That seems too soft, too pitiable.
What James was doing, rather, was outright mourning, ruing the loss of a way of life, a set of shared ethics he had mistakenly imagined to be fixed.
It’s not inaccurate to suggest that I am feeling something similar—not that we’ve been living these last years in a utopia, but that the difficulties we have been facing, the disruptions of a broken culture, were at least addressable if not entirely fixable, that the moral arc of the universe might still accrue. Such a notion, such a belief system, has been eclipsed by the election, which turned out even worse than, at my most pessimistic, I might have feared. In the aftermath, I’m taking a breath from both the past and the future. Call it the present as a state of being. This is why I was reading about James this morning, which is a Sunday, the day on which, until recently, my ritual was to spend hours sifting my way through two newspapers in their entirety: front sections, opinion, features, arts.
Or maybe it’s that the newspapers have also let me down.
James understood that any pause was only an illusion, that history is not a narrative but an implacable force. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was made to understand this when the Great War started and the genteel sensibilities of La Belle Époque were exposed as lies. Either way, his statement seems to offer a point of reference. It seems to offer a useful lens. It serves as a reminder that we—and I am referring to us now as humans, rather than as merely citizens—have been through similar great upheavals many times throughout our history. In that sense, our task will be to stand for the ideals we share, and also to continue to enact them, any way and everywhere we can.
Hence, this issue of Air/Light, which seeks to think about community. It seeks to showcase the power of literature and art. Our focus is on text and image hybrids; in this moment especially, how could we not present artists who draw outside the lines? As to why, it’s because we hope that blurring discipline or genre might lead to a new set of pathways, a different set of possibilities. If anything is certain, we will need such skills during the coming years. Air/Light will continue to be a place of creative conversation—which is to say a place where all of us can breathe.
