The genre of inspiration quotations relies on breaking complex, importation thinkers down into single, pithy statements. I’m not usually a fan. At the same time, however, occasionally a quotation does hit you in the chest, pressing down and refusing to let go until you find it hard to breathe. I recently experienced that with this line from Søren Kierkegaard: “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
For most of us who actively hope and try to resist the current administration, our sights remain readily focused on the 2018 midterm elections. They will be our next chance to slow the march of pseudo-authoritarianism in the United States. From there, our eyes turn to 2020, when we will nominate someone who, hopefully, will find dispatching President Trump and his campaign as easy as many claim it should have been in 2016.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is 2016 that is on my mind right now. Perhaps it’s the French election, perhaps it’s that I happened to overhear “Fight Song” yesterday, I don’t know. What I have been thinking about is how many of my friends, even my loved ones, voted for Hillary Clinton out of fear for Donald Trump, not out of any particular excitement. Which, fine, a vote’s a vote. Something I’ve struggled with personally, though, since November 8th of last year has been my own emotions regarding Hillary Clinton.
There’s a scene in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s among the most famous scenes in the book. The main character, Stephen Dedalus, is a child, home from school for the Christmas holidays. It is, indeed, set during Christmas dinner. As is so often the case during such family meals, a political fight breaks out between those who are loyal to the Catholic Church in Ireland and those who feel that it actively subverted the nationalist politician, Charles Parnell, who was widely considered at the time to have been Ireland’s best chance at independence. However, because Parnell was discovered to have had a long term affair, with Kitty O’Shea (a legally married woman), the Catholic Church came out publically against Parnell and, at least in the narrative put forward by Joyce (and possibly in fact, as well), hounded him until his death shortly thereafter. I’d like to bring us through the scene, if you don’t mind overly much. Skip through as you will, because I plan to quote heavily, but I do suggest you read as much of it as you can, as it is one of my favorite scenes in literature. (Dashes within the quoted text, I wanted to note, signal for Joyce quotation. He refuses to use quotation marks for conversation.)
Let’s start just before Christmas, as Stephen thinks about the nature of God and his place in the universe:
[Stephen] turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.
Twice earlier in the novel, Stephen has noticed the green velvet as a symbol of Parnell, as a symbol of an independent Ireland. Now, the housekeeper, Dante (her name echoing the great Catholic poet), has torn off that velvet because of Parnell’s—literal?—fall from grace. I especially love the line, “That was called politics.” After all, so much of the arguing that constitutes political debate, in the US but also in any country, is the long work of arguing with loved ones. Whether on facebook or in real life, we debate far more often with those we respect, those we love, than we do with strangers. I also love how the paragraph ends on the note of the newspaper. For Joyce, as Bruce Robbins writes elegantly about, the newspaper is a continual metaphor, appearing at the end of his most famous short story, “The Dead”, as a kind of unionizing force, one that allows all of Ireland, at once, to be seen and engaged with. Benedict Anderson, the 20th century’s foremost theorist of national formation, argued in his seminal work, Imagined Communities, that newspapers formed the backbone of the ability for people to imagine themselves as members of the same community, the same nation, despite being separated by great distances. Then, as now, it had incrementally become impossible to know a significant fraction of one’s fellow citizens, but newspapers allowed the entire country to self-examine, and thus self-imagine, itself into existence. As he writes:
Why this transformation should be so important for the birth of the imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper. For these forms provided the technical means for ‘representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” (25)
Furthering this comparison between newspapers and novels, Anderson writes, “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36) or, as he jokes, “Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot” (38). Finally, then, to home in on the newspaper as the form which allows a country to, shall we say, read itself, Anderson makes clear that “we have seen that the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid simultaneity through time” (65). In this way, a novel such as Joyce’s works just as the newspapers Stephen has recognized as important—both allow a nation to gain a wider perspective upon itself, seeing members of its wider community who would otherwise seem nonexistent or inexpressible. Or, as Joyce writes following the above quoted material, “It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak.”
Soon thereafter, Parnell dies. Joyce handles the scene with a light hand, gently and perhaps even minimalistically representing just enough to embody the tragedy. Stephen, who has at this point fallen quite ill and is in the school’s infirmary, distantly hears voices:
How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.
He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters’ edge to see the ship that was entering their harbour. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards the flat dark land: and by the light at the pierhead he saw his face, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.
He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters:
—He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque. A wail of sorrow went up from the people.
—Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!
They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.
And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the water’s edge.
The comparison between the people’s voices and the waves is gorgeous. The people, then, become a part of the natural ecosystem, with their coming political tidings a fact of life, a facet of natural reality. Moreover, they are represented en masse as supporting Parnell. At this point, Stephen seems to hallucinate, likely due to a fever, during which he imagines the news coming into the harbor of Parnell’s death—something he is likely literally overhearing, for which he is providing an imagined visual field—then sees the mourners fall to their knees, then pictures Dante “proudly and silently” refusing to be commune with the mourners, refusing even to acknowledge them. She is, as will soon become clear, glad for Parnell’s death, glad to see that “bad man”, as she described him to Stephen, die. That small detail, though, that she walks “silently” is remarkable—given my reading of the scene, Stephen is providing visual stimuli for himself based on the auditory stimuli of the people talking. Dante, however, comes from without; she is not caused by what Stephen can here. She is, instead, already there, always already a part of his reading of politics, the only detail Stephen provides without a present antecedent or cause.
Immediately after this scene, there is a line break, and then there is the Christmas dinner. Stephen is home now, and at first things are well. The scene begins with a warm description of the family by the fire, content, waiting for dinner, which will “be ready in a jiffy his mother had said.” Uncle Charles and Stephen’s father punctuate their banal conversation with laughter, until eventually dinner comes and Stephen offers a traditional Catholic blessing. Then, “All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.” It seems trite, but altogether unavoidable, to mention the attention to detail here, from Stephen’s father’s sigh of pleasure, to the “pearled … glistening drops” around the lid. For Stephen, this is a special meal, the first time he has been allowed to eat with the adults, and both he and his father are feeling emotional at this ceremonial coming of age:
It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel queer and oldish: and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass, his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And uncle Charles had said so too.
I think it’s clear, too, that his entry to the adult table is his de facto entry into politics, as will shortly be made manifest.
Soon, Stephen’s father and Mr. Casey begin to make jokes at the Catholic Church’s expense. Up until this point, there has been some tension between Dante and Stephen’s father, but it has been subsumed, only noticeable in that the conversation is focused on someone named “Christy” and Dante’s refusal of sauce after Stephen’s father has forgotten to offer her any. The critical moment comes after Mr. Dedalus says, “suavely”, that Catholic priests “have only themselves to blame … If they took a fool’s advice they would confine their attention to religion,” to which Dante responds, “It is religion… They are doing their duty in warning the people.” Mr. Casey then rejoins, “We go to the house of God… in all humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election addresses.” (I wonder what Mr. Casey would think of Trump’s recent executive order to allow for more such election addresses from members of the clergy…) Dante repeats herself, saying, “It is religion… They are right. They must direct their flocks.” As will likely be unsurprising to anyone who has experienced a conversation like this one, the three continue to repeat themselves, becoming increasingly angry, until Stephen’s mother demands that they drop their fight, “For pity sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year,” to which Uncle Charles offers his agreement. Nonetheless, Dante continues to prod Mr. Casey and Stephen’s father, first with a petty aside and then with, “And am I to sit here and listen to the pastors of my church being flouted?” The conversation continues to escalate then, as the participants tread the line between criticizing the priests and criticizing the religion:
—Nobody is saying a word against them, said Mr Dedalus, so long as they don’t meddle in politics.
—The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.
—Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.
—You hear? said Dante, turning to Mrs Dedalus.
—Mr Casey! Simon! said Mrs Dedalus, let it end now.
—Too bad! Too bad! said uncle Charles.
—What? cried Mr Dedalus. Were we to desert [Parnell] at the bidding of the English people?
—He was no longer worthy to lead, said Dante. He was a public sinner.
—We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly.
—WOE BE TO THE MAN BY WHOM THE SCANDAL COMETH! said Mrs Riordan. IT WOULD BE BETTER FOR HIM THAT A MILLSTONE WERE TIED ABOUT HIS NECK AND THAT HE WERE CAST INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA RATHER THAN THAT HE SHOULD SCANDALIZE ONE OF THESE, MY LEAST LITTLE ONES. That is the language of the Holy Ghost.
—And very bad language if you ask me, said Mr Dedalus coolly.
—Simon! Simon! said uncle Charles. The boy.
The boy, of course, to whom they refer is Stephen. Charles, who we know has not taken a side in this debate, repeatedly seems anxious at what the boy might be hearing. Briefly, attention is turned to whether Stephen is eating enough, and he and the rest are giving more turkey. Dante sits “with her hands in her lap” and “red in the face”. Stephen’s father attempts a joke to lighten the mood, which goes over as well as could be expected:
—There’s a tasty bit here we call the pope’s nose. If any lady or gentleman…
He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying:
—Well, you can’t say but you were asked. I think I had better eat it myself because I’m not well in my health lately.
He winked at Stephen and, replacing the dish-cover, began to eat again.
There was a silence while he ate.
Mr. Dedalus continues to talk and to talk as he does here, but the rest of the table continue to refuse to respond. To me, that’s one of the most mimetic features of the scene, the easily recognizable social dynamics by which Mr. Dedalus attempts (and fails) to deescalate the fight. Eventually, he becomes sullen, “Well, my Christmas dinner has been spoiled anyhow,” to which Dante replies, “There could be neither luck nor grace… in a house where there is no respect for the pastors of the church.” From here, the fight grows hotter and hotter, with insults aimed at the priests growing in viciousness:
Mr Dedalus threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate.
—Respect! he said. Is it for Billy with the lip or for the tub of guts up in Armagh? Respect!
—Princes of the church, said Mr Casey with slow scorn.
—Lord Leitrim’s coachman, yes, said Mr Dedalus.
—They are the Lord’s anointed, Dante said. They are an honour to their country.
—Tub of guts, said Mr Dedalus coarsely.
The adults half-heartedly refer to Stephen now, with Charles or his mother worried about what he’s hearing, and the rest then using him as a pawn in their arguments, before they begin to swear. There’s a certain self-awareness here to how this conversation will imprint itself upon Stephen, which if Stephen is indeed Joyce’s substitute for himself, turns out to be quite true:
[Mr Dedalus] twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping noise with his lips.
—Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen. It’s not right.
—O, he’ll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly—the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.
—Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests’ pawns broke Parnell’s heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up.
—Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When [Parnell] was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Low-lived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it!
—They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them!
—Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes!
Uncle Charles raised his hands mildly and said:
—Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely.
The repeated interjections from Uncle Charles and Stephen’s mother, begging for a kind of reasonable disengagement, continue to be ignored. The rest of the adults debate whether or not Mr. Casey and Mr. Dedalus are renegade Catholics, protestants, or something worse, with Dante regularly mocking them. “The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the language I have heard this evening,” she says.
After a long and winding story, centered around the death of Parnell, referred to in a pseudo-tribal way as “the chief”, paying heed to Ireland’s more medieval past, Stephen has a thought to himself about his own political leanings:
He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played GOD SAVE THE QUEEN at the end.
There’s something so innocent here, with Stephen’s confusion at how Dante could possibly be against Parnell, but also for Irish independence. It’s a feeling I think many of us have, even as adults, when we see someone refusing to support the candidate we are just so sure better represents their vested interests. In any case, Stephen struggles to understand why the adults are fighting, what they are fighting about, and what exactly they’re referring to when they reference Kitty O’Shea, Parnell’s lover and downfall.
Stephen’s father and Mr. Casey press onward, arguing for the Church’s historical role in undercutting the Irish independence movement, while Dante continues to endorse the Church wholesale.
Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.
—Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.
Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:
—A bad business! A bad business!
Mr Dedalus repeated:
—A priest-ridden Godforsaken race!
He pointed to the portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right.
—Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.
Dante broke in angrily:
—If we are a priest-ridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God’s eye. TOUCH THEM NOT, says Christ, FOR THEY ARE THE APPLE OF MY EYE.
[A quick aside—Christ never uses the phrase “apple of my eye”, and certainly not to refer to Catholic priests. Many see Joyce subtly undercutting Dante’s argument here, suggesting that all her bluster is in reality based on secondhand misunderstanding.]
—And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us?
—A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.
—Were they, faith? said Mr Casey.
He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.
—Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confession box? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?
His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
The physical movements Joyce takes care to describe, from facial tics to fists thrown against tables, enlivens the scene and gives it a physical depth. Moreover, there’s something powerful in imagining Stephen’s face starting to blush, as a kind of empathic connection forms between him and Mr. Casey. The scene finally ends, as Mr. Casey heretically denies God, Dante admits her full scorn for Parnell, and Stephen’s father completely breaks down.
Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey:
—Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first.
Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her:
—Mrs Riordan, don’t excite yourself answering them.
—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world.
Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.
—Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!
—John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve.
Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.
—No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland. Away with God!
—Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.
Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating:
—Away with God, I say!
Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy-chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:
—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
The door slammed behind her.
Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.
—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!
He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.
And thus the scene ends, with Stephen confronted by his father’s crying—a traumatizing experience in its own right for a young boy, to see his own father crying.
I have quoted at such length not just to prove any local point, but instead to allow for a more global reading of the entire scene, even for those who have not read it. Joyce’s depiction of this Christmas dinner is one of the most overtly political moments in his corpus, and has been generally understood as an autobiographical account of Joyce’s own childhood pain at the fall and death of Parnell. While his opinions of Ireland shifted regularly—sometimes erratically—throughout his adult life, his childhood love for Parnell and his anger at those who had allowed for his fall never seems to have wavered. With Parnell’s death, the dream of a united and independent Ireland was pushed back nearly a generation; it would take a failed uprising and a full-scale guerrilla war in order to finally free the southern part of the island. To this day, though, Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom.
It is November 9th, maybe four in the morning, and I am still either drunk or experiencing emotional whiplash. I am probably experiencing both. My entire family has gone to sleep, I can taste tequila in the back of my mouth, and Donald Trump is officially the president-elect. I call a friend, and my call wakes her up. She is also drunk, and she is someone who had been in class with me the first time I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I describe to her something I haven’t been able to explain to anyone else, because I don’t know anyone else who has read the novel and who would take my calls so late at night/early in the morning. I tell her about how despite all the readings I’ve come across centered on the emotional power of the Christmas dinner scene and despite my general understanding of the political situation in Ireland at the turn of the century, I have never really understood, never really gotten, the scene. It was a focal point in my senior thesis, but still I had disliked it. It had always seemed to be a bit gauche, perhaps a shade purple, certainly unbecoming of Joyce and clearly overdone or underwritten or both.
Now, however, half-drunk and brokenhearted, I understand. And all I can think about, as I stare into the darkness, is how they have destroyed my hero, my queen you could even say, for bullshit reasons and misbegotten lies. She has been undone, like Parnell, not for her indiscretions, but out of a severely over-moralistic response to those indiscretions. She has been stopped, in her tracks, by those without the moral fortitude to rise above the petty everyday issues of the campaign and those like the Catholic Church who have pressed their fingers on the scale and worked to destroy her. The media and James Comey, perhaps by accident, and the Russians, certainly on purpose, along with so many have worked together to destroy a candidate I don’t just support, but a candidate that I have loved for years, a candidate to whom I have pinned all my hopes and all my dreams for a better country, a candidate who said we need more love as a culture, one who has promised increased domestic spending on programs that will help people, one who plans for the future, who offered a brighter future, one who was strong and capable and experienced and ready.
But the country wasn’t ready. I don’t want to get into the mistakes of the campaign cycle. I don’t want to have to tell you that, yes, she never went to Wisconsin, but she did damn well go to Pennsylvania just about every week, and she lost there by twice as much. And I don’t want to argue the merits of her message, the reasons for her downfall, the causes of Trump’s success. I just don’t. What I wanted to share with you here, even if you had never read the scene from Joyce’s novel before, was a sense of my devastation when Hillary Clinton lost. Some of you still won’t understand. Talking to one of the field’s distinguished Joyce scholars, I explained my experience, I explained how I had never really understood Joyce’s pain at the defeat of Parnell, and I compared my own experience with Joyce’s. “Hillary Clinton is no Parnell”, he replied. And perhaps he’s right.
But to me, she meant so much.
Many look forward to replacing the Republican Congress with a Democratic one. Many are excited by the candidates lining up to run in 2020. Many are fired up, angry, ready to fight and resist against the administration. And I exist in that world—my attention is paid to the political fight, it is centered in the arena, I am ready to do whatever I can to stop Trump. But I also exist in another world, the one I will never be able to access, the one in which Tim Kaine is Vice President and Hillary Clinton is President, and we aren’t losing our health care and we aren’t banning Muslims and we aren’t denying science. Again, Søren Kierkegaard: “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
When I think about November 8th, I feel as though someone died. Yes, when I think about it, I am filled with the same nauseated feeling, the same pit of dread, the same hollow emptiness I have as when I think about the day my mother died, January 23rd, 2013. For both, though, it is not the loss itself that hurts the most, but the living—day after day—in the wrong future. It is about knowing that life could be better than it is, but having to slog through nonetheless. It is, I think, what Joyce experienced, knowing that Parnell was stolen from Ireland, and having to live without him and without the change and promise he represented. It is knowing exactly what would make things better, but being forever separated from such a panacea.
Hillary Clinton may not mean that much to you, and she might not have been such a panacea. But she will always have a deep place in my heart. Because despite her flaws, despite her indiscretions, despite her mistakes, she was smart and she was kind and she was strong. She understood me, understood my family, understood what we needed to live our best lives. Perhaps she was too reactionary, perhaps she was too bellicose, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But she inspired in me a love for the best in this country, and she inspired a hope that someday I might possess, as she represented, a drive to persevere despite all odds, an unwillingness to give up, and a boundless energy to work through whatever divides us no matter the sacrifices and no matter the costs. When she looked into the camera, despite how politically jaded I have become, I felt like she saw me, and I knew, on a profound and visceral level, that she was fighting for me, despite never having known my name.
Joyce never stopped mourning the loss of Charles Parnell. Perhaps I, too, will never shake my youthful allegiance to Hillary Clinton. Whatever you happen to think of her, though, in my heart I know that I will be a stronger, kinder, and smarter person due to her example. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. Many of the people I like and respect most failed to see that side of her, and have judged me for my own naivety. And who knows, I could be wrong. I might be naïve. Maybe Hillary Clinton isn’t who I imagine her to be—or rather, who I imagined she would be. Because she lost, we will never know.
But I do know what she symbolizes for me. And that, as we wage battle against the darkness and as we hold onto each other in this terrible and sometimes hopeless future, matters. To close with another quotation plucked out of context: “Legacy. What is a legacy? / It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
No matter how painful the price of remembering that future none of us will ever get to see, as we march forward, I refuse for the good I do to be the legacy of a would-be despot. I refuse to be defined by the reality of the world as it is. Instead, in my own self-narrative, I live in sight of the world as it could and can be, and the good I do will be part of the legacy of our would-be president—Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Welcome 