One Grain of Sand

I can’t bring myself to quote the same things we quoted eight years ago, the Brecht, the MLK, the whatever-else-it-was that gave us hope. That doesn’t mean there isn’t hope, but the element of discovery and surprise is gone, and thus the feeling of inspiration. At least for me. For me, the last eight years have felt very long.

Things are very broken right now. The world feels broken on a very deep level, so that the basic functioning of things that are supposed to keep ticking away are no longer doing so. And the brokenness feels so pervasive. I can’t seem to get far enough away from it to even articulate all the ways in which it expresses itself. I said that about the quotes just now, but then immediately thought of Beckett. We can’t possibly go through all of this again, but here we are, going through it again. (“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”)

At the end of the 1984 children’s fantasy film The Neverending Story, all of the heroes have failed at their quest. Everything has been destroyed. All that is left of their vast world is one grain of sand, illuminated in the hand of the Childlike Empress. It’s an ember, and all that the real-world protagonist has to do to breathe life back into this world is to believe he can, to say the word, to make a wish, and the heroes and landscapes will roar back into existence again.

It’s just an image from a kid’s movie. Life is not a fairy tale. I don’t know how to oppose the real forces of darkness. This is just a few paragraphs, some words on a screen. I don’t have anything useful or clever to say. All I have is this seed of something, or not even a seed. A grain of sand. Just one. But maybe we can wish on it together.