Horror has Personality
viewing the next four years like a round-the-world sailing race
“If a student were to try and write this time in a novel,” I told a friend last week, “and wrote that the last true environmental president passed away at 100, and American flags were flying half-mast as the first convicted felon was inaugurated as president on MLK day - as fires raged across LA - I’d say: this is too much. The symbolism is too heavy-handed. You’ve contrived the weather to match the mood. You’ve layered melodramatic acts.”
It is, as I’m sure many of you agree, too much. And it is real. So, here we are, trying to find the ways we each make meaning of this moment and discover our roles within it. What is the art we’ll make? The counter currents we’ll create or join?
I admittedly feel unsettled. Everyone I know feels unsettled. I am thinking of war journalist Martha Gellhorn who once wrote “I feel terribly strange, like a shadow, and full of dread. I dread the time ahead…I do not see how to manage it. I do not want the world to go dark and narrow and mean, and the world has been very unlovely in my eyes, and I very unlovely in it…”
This is how many of us are stepping into 2025: carefully, full of dread. Perhaps trying to keep ourselves as lovely as possible, spiritually. We see the shadow.
*
Four years ago, during the felon’s last presidency and a blossoming pandemic, I fell in love with the Vendee Globe, an extreme sailing race founded in 1989 by French yachtsman Philippe Jeantot. The around-the-world race starts and finishes in Les Sables-d'Olonne. Sailors operate their boats single-handedly, including navigation and critical repairs.
The race is months long and dangerous - boats regularly capsize, weather conditions can be treacherous, and rescues are often out of range, especially around Point Nemo. Sailors have broken legs and arms, and gone missing at sea, like Gerry Roufs in ‘96.
Every morning for the last few months, I wake up and check the standings. Mostly because I love sailing, but also because I so desperately want a woman to win. I know she won’t, not this year. But I love the number of women in the race - even at a mere 15% of the fleet - and how capably they’ve sailed.
As I write to you, the race is in its concluding phase. A man, Charlie Dalin, has already won, setting a course record by nine days. There are four women in the top twenty - including Justine Mettraux in eighth place, Clarisse Cremer in 11th, and Samantha Davis in twelfth. (She is racing against her ex husband - she is, currently, two places ahead of him - a distance of roughly 1,000 nautical miles).
Only 12 women have ever attempted the race, and no woman has ever won. Britain's Ellen MacArthur grabbed a second-place podium finish in 2001. Only three women have ever finished in the top 10.
As someone who becomes annoyed when she can’t open a gum wrapper while driving, I could never imagine myself changing sails in gale-force winds while rounding Cape Horn - so I admire the work. I love watching women boldly spend nearly 90 days alone at sea, taking enormous risks, demonstrating profound competence in rough sea states. And I can’t tell you how badly I want them to overcome centuries of underinvestment and lack of faith - how badly I want one of them to win.
I feel echoes of Fitgerald’s iconic last line of Gatsby - so we beat on, boats against the current.
This against-the-predominant wind mentality is what I anticipate the next four years feeling like. Sailing through hurricane-force winds with little rest between storms. The horizon looks pretty dark and daunting from where we stand today on day one.
I think you navigate accordingly. You move sails twice your body weight. You take some risks. You call upon your skills and courage. You help where you can. Eventually, you break through to the other side of a storm, to land, to sun.
Four years feels horribly long. When the next Vendee Globe begins, we’ll be at the beginning of a new administration. (I can’t help but think: what will be left of our democracy and planet? How will we be changed on the other side?)
We beat on.
*
During my Sardinia trip in December, I followed a brilliant Italian director up and down mountains, to cliffs, through small and dying towns. Laura Luchetti is a woman of multitudes, warmth, and artful wit.
I ended up writing down many of her quotes. One day she turned and said to me: Megan, horror has personality.
Didn’t it, today? With it’s whispy hair and dumb mouth, issuing threats, inviting clown upon clown to the table.
Laura also said: God (or whatever that means for you) gets in the shittiest places. He gets everywhere.
I am thinking of those lines as I try to avoid the news on the close of Inauguration Day, hoping the various forces of good find the shitty, painful places and help those left most in need as a cruel agenda unfurls. I tend to believe in secular forces of good - the ones that come not from the heavens but our own actions and efforts.
I don’t think this is going to be easy for any of us, let alone those of you who follow me because you, too, are soft-hearted environmentalists who want clean air, clean water, safe passages and thriving lives for all species.
As Martha Gellhorn once wrote to an acquaintance in a letter: I think you better pull up your socks.
xo
M
PS - I hope my (beloved! cherished!) paid subscribers enjoyed the workbook on negotiating a relationship with beauty.
Megan, have you ever watched the survival show, Alone?? It's sooo good. Our kids got into it too. A woman has never won that either, *but* the way they go about surviving is SO inspiring to me and quite different from the males. Could write a whole Substack about it. Anyway, that's what I thought of reading about you cheering for the women sailors. xoxx
Thank you for these lovely thoughts, Megan. Among other things, this reminds me that this year I want to read my friend Janet's edited collection of Gellhorn's letters, which has sat on my TBR shelves for too long.