#21: Leaving Hadestown
Today is Inauguration Day, 2021. This letter isn't about politics, but foreshadowing and weariness.
On the first day of 2020, I went to see the musical Hadestown on Broadway. It was an incredible show, the kind that captures reality a little too accurately while being entirely fictional, and in this case, mythical.
The story is a combined retelling of the tales of two ill-fated mythical couples, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and Persephone, set in a Great-Depression-era-ish time.
Hadestown is an underground factory of despondent workers building a wall, which is ruled by the angry King Hades, and each winter, he keeps his wife Persephone there, shrouding the world in cold and darkness until spring arrives, when she can briefly travel north to brighten the world once again.
Meanwhile, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is textbook tragedy: They are young, in love and ill-fated. Eurydice, in a desperate attempt for survival, unwittingly signs her life away to Hades, and Orpheus, in a valiant effort to save her, manages to get to Hadestown and negotiate a deal with Hades in which he can lead her out of Hadestown as long as he doesn't turn around to see if she is following him. If he turns, she is stuck with Hades forever.
Of course, unable to overcome doubt, at the last moment he looks (she was there all along) and he loses her forever.
I couldn't have known what foreshadowing the story was for the year but in retrospect, it was a prediction as much as a warning.
2020 felt like the nadir of a long drought of hope and livelihood, which was steadily capitalized upon by unfriendly giants who managed to convince many of the neediest to sign their lives away.
It was also a tremendous test in hope and trust, in the form of a virus that required us all to walk alone toward survival without any visual assurance of success. We, too, were asked to trust that walking alone was the way to save each other.
Against that backdrop, today, Inauguration Day, feels most like what I imagine Persephone's annual train ride out of the underworld felt like. No guarantee of eternal summer, no solution to despair, but a small breath of fresh air and the potential for birth as we get out from under the thumb of one such giant for the season ahead.
This is not to say there aren’t other giants waiting in the wings, most, perhaps born of our own doubt, disillusionment and, as Persephone warns, our willingness to fight harder to be heard in this season than ensure the seasons last at all. The tests continue.
Time Spent is a series of occasional letters by Jihii Jolly, exploring how we spend time, most often regarding how we consume the news and how we care for ourselves and each other. You can subscribe here if you’re new.