20 December 2025

Koyaanisquatsi, Dear Reader, is a Hopi word that translates to “life out of balance” or “a state of living that calls for another way of living.” Koyaanisquatsi is also the title of 1982’s wordless documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.  That film made a big impression on me—and on my late mother Virginia, who had my husband David spell it out on the chalkboard she kept in her Clearwater apartment so she could put a name to how she experienced life much of the time.  So, on this Saturday night, it’s not surprising that the past week’s events have repeatedly brought both film and term to mind, even as I so clumsily tap this out on my laptop keyboard, accustomed as I am to the much more familiar setup of remote keyboard and mouse disrupted last week by a Microsoft update that rendered that arrangement unusable until tech support can arrive come Monday. Oy.

The times are out of joint. The season’s prompts to comfort and joy repeatedly collapse into horror and outrage.  First last Saturday came the all-too-common report of yet another school shooting, this time during a final exam at Brown.  Then on Sunday, another mass shooting, this time on a Sydney beach during a Hanukkah celebration.  And then most terribly, perhaps because the victims were so well known and loved by so many, sometime in between those horrors came the savage murder of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hands of their middle child, Nick, news made even worse by the appalling, deranged response of that loathsome troll, our Felon-in-Chief, the leader of the free world Koyaanisquatsi indeed.

Inevitably, even horror and disgust temper in the course of a week’s passing.  But tomorrow at 10.03 am, the winter solstice arrives in Madbury, New Hampshire, along with the shortest day of the year.  The light will return.  But what of hope?  Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the character Rob Reiner played in Norman Lear’s breakthrough comedy, All in the Family, consistently countered his father-in-law’s ignorant, racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic rants with rational counter-arguments, but also with enough empathy that he could speculate about what might have shaped Archie Bunker into the bigot he became.  Praise be to such enlightened comedy.  Our current late-night comedians also comfort as they mock the inhumanity of Donald J. Trump and lament the corrosion of what on his last broadcast of the year Jimmy Kimmel, his voice husky with tears withheld, called Superman’s credo of truth, justice, and the American way.  Indeed.  I am, for the first time in my life, ashamed to be American.  And of the many retorts to the President’s nauseating response to the Reiner family tragedy, Seth Myers’s was the most eloquent, a heartfelt tribute to a great-souled artist and an excoriation of the banal evil of Trump.  Watch it if you haven’t.

So.  There’s the double-edged sword of technology that can connect and comfort as well as stoke hatred and, at the least, baffle (as was the case with my recent computer cockup, leading to repeated conversations with a Dell technician in New Delhi who was rather less than deft with small talk as he waited for uploads (“And do you live alone or with a family?  Do you have pets?  Often people who live alone have pets”).  Comedians reinforce our recognition of norms now exploded, and art can unite a room full of strangers experiencing together the pain of and consolation for unspeakable grief, as it did in the movie theatre where I watched Chloé Zhao’s extraordinary rendering of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, so Shakespearean, as James Shapiro pointed out, in its evocation of the green world and the artistry necessary to re-work old material into compellingly relevant experience.  Rob Reiner’s art endures, too:  go watch Stand By Me again, or A Few Good Men.

Does the longevity of art counterbalance all the losses of late?  Getting old is famously not for sissies, and balance can be a literal and figurative casualty of aging.  I’m certainly aware of diminishing capability, and trying to balance that recognition with a plan for action has me attending death cafés and finding inspiration in the Peacock series The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.  But there’s consolation, too, in understanding why we’re in the mess that we’re in. Anna Lembke, Professor and Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, posits an explanation for a culture out of balance in her 2021 book, Dopamine Nation, and on successive episodes of the Hidden Brain podcast, “The Paradox of Pleasure” and “The Path to Enough.”  Using her own embarrassing personal experience of addiction to raunchy romance novels, Lembke quite compellingly explains how our modern world of overconsumption (of drugs, food, shopping, media, etc.) leads to anxiety and unhappiness.  Arguing that the relentless pursuit of pleasure, so easily accessible online, creates a dopamine deficit, our brains’ attempt to restore chemical homeostasis that ultimately spirals into anxiety and depression,  Lembke proposes solutions to reset our reward pathways and restore a healthy balance of the brain chemistry attending our experience of pleasure and pain.  She’s made me examine not only my own habits, but also suggested some insight into what drives our chronically over-indulged ruling class, especially a “leader” so wretchedly hollow that he can only find pleasure and self-worth in demeaning others.  Of course he wants to shut down any person or medium capable of inspiring insight.  Defund PBS!  Mock the murdered Reiners!   Censor anyone who fails to lavish praise!   And make sure your name precedes that of a fallen president on the nation’s performing arts center.  Pathetic.

I’m writing this on solstice eve:  after tomorrow, the light begins to return.  I’ve resolved to put into practice the methods of the Swedish death cleaners:  discard what distracts and burdens.  And I remain grateful for the many helpers in my life:  my neighbor, who lifts the KitchenAid mixer too heavy for a recent hernia repair; the house painters who honored me as a favorite client by inviting me to their annual company dinner; my friend who every week shares an hour’s account of the ups and downs of negotiating this moment in our lives; my fellow book lovers who convene monthly to talk about how what we read illuminates our world and our place in it.  So what if the mail brings mostly glossy booklets advertising expensive cruises, expensive retirement communities, and expensive hearing aids?  It also brings Christmas cards with news and good wishes for the coming year.  So what if a shopping quest for a simple cake plate leads to a queasy disgust at the amount of crap we are encouraged to buy?  It also stiffens my resolve to cast off and lighten my load.  And you, Dear Reader:  you’re out there, too, receiving, considering, and, I hope, getting something out of this desultory philippic.  Here’s to you.

And here’s to the light.  As the carolers sing:  Let nothing you dismay.