← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
‘A Hard Time We Had of It’
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Merry Christmas and happy holidays! This week Ross Douthat shares one of his favorite poems for the occasion, “The Journey of the Magi,” written by T.S. Eliot, to reflect on a year one might call “interesting.” See you next year!
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Merry Christmas and Happy Almost New Year 2025, at least in my experience, was a year when the future seemed more open, more uncertain, and maybe in some ways more frightening than at any point in recent memory. And so I thought I would read a poem for the season that spoke directly to the experience of transformation, anxiety in its shadow, and hopefully revelation as well. So this is the Journey of The Magi by T.S. eliot. A cold coming. We had of it just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey, the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter and the camels galled, sore footed refractory lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces and the silken girls bringing sherbet, then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women and the night fires going out and the lack of shelters and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly and the villages dirty and charging high prices. A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all foll valley. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness and three trees on the low sky, and an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel, six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver and feet kicking the empty wineskins. But there was no information and so we continued and arrived at evening not a moment too soon, finding the place. It was, you may say, satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again. But set down this, set down this. Were we led all that way for birth or death? There was a birth, certainly we had evidence, and no doubt I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. So when I read this poem to my children as practice, they said, dad, that's kind of dark. And in a way it is. But I think an understanding of the darkness that's threaded in amid the joy and happiness and presents on Christmas morning is really crucial to understanding the true spirit of Christmas, that the reality of the darkness is the reason for the light. So Merry Christmas.
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