These are dark times. Literally, since the winter solstice was yesterday, but emotionally and politically, too, as omicron surges and a nihilistic GOP gains ground while Democrats falter.

These are the times when it is good to turn to poetry: I have been re-reading Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem, “The Hill We Climb.” It’s as inspiring today as it was in the beginning of the year, precisely because it acknowledges the exhaustion and brutal realities from which hope, perseverance, and progress nonetheless emerge.

These are the times when it is good to turn to historians for the solace of the long view. In her missive of December 19, Heather Cox Richardson quotes The American Crisis, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet from the same date in 1776, “at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low”:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Richardson goes on to recount how the new American enterprise seemed doomed after the initial excitement of that summer’s Declaration of Independence gave way to the bleakness of exhaustion, demoralization, and retreat. She continues, quoting Paine:

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.

Patriots rallied, and nearly five years later, a new nation emerged—“A republic, if you can keep it,” in the prescient words of Benjamin Franklin.

Can we? It sometimes feels doubtful in these dark days.

Yet these are also the times when from now until the summer solstice, the light will grow each and every day. And beyond, too, if we heed Amanda Gorman’s call:

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.