Reading in the Dark
In the age of Trump, literature can sustain those searching for the courage to resist the politics of division.
On the eve of World War II, the German writer Bertolt Brecht composed the famous poem “To Those Born After.” Brecht addressed himself to a posterity that, he believed, would be unable to understand how it felt to live in a time of acute moral and political crisis. What defines such a time, he wrote, is that disaster becomes the only possible subject of thought, crowding out everything we think of as ordinary life: “What kind of times are these, when/To talk about trees is almost a crime/Because it implies silence about so many horrors?”
Brecht urged his readers to consider the actions of people living in these “dark times,”
