To close out the year, we’ve asked our contributors and staff to make a prediction about 2022. You would think, at least since the early days of 2020, that we’d have learned our lesson about making predictions, but we couldn’t resist. Feel free to save these if you want to embarrass us with them later.
For 2022, I predict that some will do good and others evil; some will hate and some will love; some will die and others will live. What happens in the dumbshow we call our politics won’t change this. We have been through cataclysmic times before, when it seemed that the lamps might not be lit again in our lifetimes. We have seen off worse pandemics, worse wars, worse tyranny, and worse natural disasters.
A year into the First World War, the editor of the Saturday Review asked Thomas Hardy for something to help “keep the torch alight in the black”. He responded with a vision of defiant normalcy, even “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”:
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
I predict that hard, lonely work, harvest, and young love will continue in 2022.
