The Sinking Chair

 

 

Christopher Benfey

It will take time to sink in, we tell ourselves, but this time the sinking feels physical, as though gravity had increased twofold. We had imagined the old excitement of sitting around the television to watch the returns trickle in state by state. But by nine o’clock we knew from a surreptitious glance at our phones that our plan was a bad one. There would be no TV, not this time, not for our friends and not for us. We numbly ate our dessert and said our goodbyes amid the inevitable jokes. See you in Ireland. Or Iceland. We hugged each other as though, absurdly, it might be a long time before we saw one another again.

The morning after, we awoke to the serene autumn morning and the usual walk through the fallen leaves with the oblivious dog. A woman was sobbing uncontrollably at the trail head. Impossible under the circumstances not to recall other elections, other mornings after. My German-Jewish father, who died this past January at ninety-eight, liked to quote his own father, a Berlin judge, after the new chancellor was appointed on January 30, 1933. “‘Wait till the next election,’ Vati said, but there never was a next election.”

In the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman celebrated the power of the common people to elect their leaders. He wrote of “the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry.” By “terrible” Whitman meant something like awe-inspiring, sublime, worthy of poetry, like the “terrible beauty” that W. B. Yeats invoked in “Easter, 1916.” The word carries a different meaning today. The two presidential elections that preceded the publication of Leaves of Grass were also terrible, despite Whitman’s comparison. Both candidates supported slavery and the expansionist Mexican War in 1848. Four years later, the Southern sympathizer Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne’s good friend, was installed in the White House, with the Civil War on the horizon. In protest against government support of slavery, Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay the poll tax in 1846.

At certain points in our history mere political campaigns and get-out-the-vote efforts can seem inadequate to the task at hand. “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the 1838 policy of Indian Removal, that mass deportation known as the Trail of Tears. But sometimes, and this is surely one of those times, imagination is as necessary as resistance. A different way forward will have to be at least as energizing, as intoxicating, as full of unrhymed poetry as the lurid Halloween campaign that just won the day. And more than voting will be needed. “Cast your whole vote,” Thoreau urged his readers in On Civil Disobedience. “Not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

Our kids attended a school where time out was exacted on the Thinking Chair, the progressive alternative to the Dunce Cap. Our younger son thought it was the Sinking Chair. It will take time to sink in, and we’re still sinking.