So-Slow Book Club, Week 6

Remembering the truth that lies beyond despair

Join us in reading The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl in a low-pressure, year-long book club. The journal prompts and discussion questions after this post are for paid subscribers only; feel free to check out one of the free posts in this series and if you like what you see, upgrade your membership for the full experience.

“To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair.” So, darkly, begins Chapter Six of The Comfort of Crows.

To be honest, election years have felt this way for me since 1992, when Bush vs. Clinton caused no small amount of strife in my small-town high school. I hated the feeling of division and conflict then, and as someone who can typically see all sides of a debate and has never fit neatly into any political party, it’s only gotten worse as elections have become more contentious, divisions more personal, debates more disconnected from civility.

I feel deep anxiety and loneliness during election years—not so much because of the policies or personalities dominating the political stage, but what training our attention on them does to the rest of us; our sense of community and connection. It’s no secret that social media has only made this divide worse. I tend to get lost in the hinterlands of anger and hostility, trying (and failing) to find a home. No place feels welcoming to me, not even the spaces filled with people I mostly agree with. In fact, those are sometimes the most upsetting places to occupy.

So I loved Renkl’s urge to “remind myself that there are other truths, too”; and to not only reflect on these truths—the beauty present in the world even when humans are too distracted to see it—but also, to take action toward creating a world more defined by those timeless truths than the false and fleeting stories we tell about ourselves, about others, about why we’re here in the first place.

Journaling & discussion prompts below the paywall, friends.