If you’ve locked your phone in a drawer, hidden the newspaper down the sofa or unplugged the radio, I wouldn’t blame you. Just glimpsing or half-hearing the headlines can be enough to plunge you into a sinkhole of gloom.
If it’s not the Trump administration ending $500m worth of funding for the very vaccine programmes that helped rescue billions from the menace of Covid – as part of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s determined effort to rollback mass immunisation, one of the greatest gifts science has given humankind – it’s the ongoing agony of Gaza, only set to increase after Benjamin Netanyahu responded to a global outcry over his use of starvation as a weapon not by moving to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into the strip, as so desperately needed, but rather to escalate the war yet further, his security cabinet agreeing early Friday morning to take over Gaza City.
If it’s not a climate crisis that sees heat records broken summer after summer, it’s the massacre in Sudan of more than 1,500 civilians sheltering in a camp for displaced people, the attack conducted over 72 bloody hours by paramilitaries backed by the United Arab Emirates, a western ally.
Or it’s the steady breakdown of tolerance that had held, imperfectly, for decades – witness those with loud megaphones who have been all but urging their followers to stage a repeat of last August’s violence in England and Northern Ireland directed at asylum seekers or the Spanish town that has banned the celebration of Muslim religious festivals in public spaces.
The supply of bad news is voluminous and apparently without end. You lament what is happening now, with the proliferation of social media pumping out falsehood, whether AI-generated or human-made, and hate – and then you are reminded of our recent past. Wednesday marked 80 years to the day since an atomic bomb, surely one of the darkest bequests science has given humankind, took the lives of as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima.
All this could lead even a sane person to despair of their fellow human beings and what they are capable of. The urge is strong to run away, to turn off the news and escape.
And yet that presents a new problem: guilt. When wars rage and innocents are slaughtered, it can feel selfish, even frivolous, to think about or pay attention to anything else. “Don’t look away,” urge those posting graphic horror on social media. Yet the need to look away, and to get away, is compelling, precisely because of the turmoil all around.
Tentatively, I want to make a moral case for escapism, for allowing oneself a break from world events. Not on the therapeutic grounds of personal wellbeing and mental health – though those are surely obvious – but as an essential means of retaining our ability to see the world, and the people, around us.
My own somewhat guilty pleasure this summer has been to follow the contest between the England and India cricket teams, which came to a thrilling climax on Monday. I appreciate that there will be some Guardian readers – and not only in the US – who will be poised to swipe, or turn, the page at the mere mention of the word cricket. But stay with me, because this is not a point about sport, but about life.
Across five separate matches, each one played from morning till dusk for five straight days, these two sides of 11 men did battle with everything they had. It was a physically gruelling competition. The England captain, Ben Stokes, who looks as if he could have commanded a platoon of men in the trenches at the Somme, has a body that has been battered through years of relentless exertion. He is an all-rounder, both batter and bowler, which , combined with his leadership duties, means he scarcely rests. After one of the five matches, he was confined to bed for four days.
The third Test match was won at the death thanks to a ball delivered by England’s Shoaib Bashir. He managed to spin it in such a way that it confounded the opponent who faced it, and he did that despite nursing a broken finger. In the closing moments of the final match on Monday, England’s Chris Woakes walked out to the middle, apparently ready to face a hard, heavy cricket ball hurtling at him at a terrifying 90mph, with one arm in a sling, his shoulder dislocated. When he ran, his face was a rictus of pain. In the end, England fell just short.
It was an enthralling 25 days, sometimes played out in searing summer sun, sometimes interrupted by July rain. What we witnessed from both teams was a display of determination so extreme, it is rarely glimpsed outside the realms of violent fanaticism. There were moments of folly and failure, dropped catches and bad decisions, but these were athletes aiming for, and often reaching, the heights of true excellence. You didn’t have to be a fan of cricket to find the sight exhilarating. In the end the series was drawn, and perhaps that was oddly fitting. The teams had matched each other in their resolve not to be beaten.
You could say the same of the Lionesses, the England women who got so close to defeat at the European football championships they all but found a seat for it on the team bus, but who never succumbed. Their commitment to succeeding, to being better, was riveting to see.
But it’s not confined to sport. Watch the performances of Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith, the two young leads in the BBC drama Mix Tape, and you see a perfect evocation of first love. Or you could read this week a touching account of what is surely a valedictory tour by the great Paul Simon. The author noted how Simon’s voice is no longer what it was, how “It’s lost its highs & lows, stuck in a breathy mid-range.” The band on stage adjust accordingly, but “Simon is such an artist, so instinctively musical, he makes the most of the voice he’s got, wringing every little bit of feeling & nuance out of it. You can see him working at it, just as obsessively committed to quality as ever.”
That obsessive pursuit of excellence is the thread that runs through John & Paul, Ian Leslie’s quite brilliant study of Lennon and McCartney and the enduring music each spurred the other to produce. It’s a reminder of what humans can do, the heights they can reach, the joy they can bring.
None of it makes any of the other stuff go away. Trump is still there when the Test match ends; death still stalks Gaza when you close Leslie’s book. But it is a useful antidote all the same. No, not useful – essential. For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars.
