I have an overactive mind, always thinking.

If I’m working on a paper, it is there in my head at night, particularly in the early morning. Sometimes sentences come even while I’m sleeping!

I’ve had this gift (though it comes with an exhausting price), ever since I was a child, growing up in what I now call a “house of doom,” with a father who believed he was the last prophet, the prophet of the end-times. How could I possibly be calm? At least from the time I was eight, I found myself observing and analyzing (and, yes, sometimes writing).

One of my brothers could escape into fantasy and art, or make his mind go blank. But I was hypervigilant, always watching out, because I was never sure what would happen next. An unquiet mind, like the title of Kay Jamison’s wonderful book, only I am not bi-polar.

No wonder one of my favorite literary writers is the seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poet John Donne, always thinking in new ways, figuring things out with metaphors that startle the brain, whether he’s talking about erotic love or about God. Later in his life he wrote “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” when he was deathly ill and almost died. Twenty-three meditations chart the course of his illness as well as his physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences (Aren’t they all intertwined?) He wanted to find meaning in his experience.

Published in 1624, after he recovered, his Devotions have continued to touch readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The phrase “for whom the bell tolls,” from Meditation 17, (referring to the funeral bell rung at a church when a member died) served as the title for Hemmingway’s novel of the same name. Donne’s Devotions found an eager audience during the AIDs crisis, for he spoke to the specific experiences and anguish of people affected by the disease—the wasting sickness, the marks, the isolation and fear of contagion. Then in 2020 came Covid-19, yet another plague. Andrew Como, as governor of New York, in his briefings, quoted “No man is an island” when stating the general public, nurses and hospitals, all needed to work together. As we were coming out of isolation, I included some of Donne’s meditations in my “Seventeenth-century Prose and Poetry” course, which I had subtitled: The Plague Years. My students fell in love with Donne. What he wrote almost exactly 400 years earlier resonated with them, powerfully during a time when Bessel Van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” had been on the New York Times Bestseller List for hundreds of weeks.

Because, of course, we are anxious people, living in dark times, fighting fear in a world that seems broken in so many ways. Sometimes we are told not to “overthink” things. Just do it.

But there is a passage in Donne’s Devotions that particularly resonates for me, and that I read with my students. It comes in Meditation 12, where the physicians “apply pigeons, to draw the vapours from the head.” This bizarre medical treatment prompts Donne to think about why and how he has “vapours” in his head. Knowing these vapors can kill a person leads him to conclude there is something self-destructive in each of us, that our mind, the very act of thinking, physiologically can destroy us. (He is so far ahead of his time, but he also comes close to blaming God for making us this way.) So here is the wonderful passage in which Donne thinks about thinking. I hope you will like it as much as I do — paradoxically, its brilliance and wit make me happy.

“wee are not onely passive, but active too, to our owne destruction; But what have I done, either to breed or to breath these vapors ? They tell me it is my Melancholy; Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe ? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke ? It is my study; doth not my Calling call for that?”

I could say I am at a loss for words—things are so horrible—yet that would not be true. For I cannot help writing.

I have been immensely sad and angry ever since I heard yesterday morning, as I was having my green tea and thinking about meditating with a program called “Waking Upon” (I am failing once again), that there had been a horrific shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church Minneapolis, and that the shooting occurred during their first Mass of the year, as children and teachers were praying, full of hope, only to be gun down by a person standing outside and shooting through a church window, targeting children. We have since learned that the suspect was depressed, suicidal but also filled with hate of so many ethnic, religious, and racial groups—but had an obsession not just with school shootings but with killing children! What have we come to?

The moral fabric of society seems to be torn around the world, the social contract shattered. It feels like we are living in the condition Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 Leviathan described as the “state of nature” before “men” (that is people) decided to form a social contract, in which they would give up certain rights for security and protection, so they would not always be doomed to live in “a state of perpetual war,” where every person is on their own, out for themelves. It feels to me that that is what we are living in. Hobbes’s solution was rather authoritarian, with an absolute monarch. Other solutions were a republic as existed in the Netherlands, or for a short time in England (1649-52) during the seventeenth century. Then there was democracy---beginning with the Revolution in America—still, to my mind, the best system, though it is currently under threat, as many nations seem leaning towards or embracing authoritarianism. But what I see is not just authoritarianism but WAR, and death of so many young people, children in the morning of their lives, leaving their families and loved ones and anyone with humanity mourning. There has been war for years in Ukraine, attacked by Russia, maternity wards targetted.. There is the middle east—the brutal attack on Nova and Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, and then now for closing in on three years the war in Gaza where so many people, innocent children, have died, hospitals destroyed ( we have known for decades that Hamas shelters itself in the midst of civilians). I’m simply overwhelmed by indiscriminate and sometimes targeting killing of young people, of children.

Sometimes severe or even untreatable mental illness can be the cause, the trigger of murdering children. Two cases feel close to me. They happened years ago, when I was living in central Illinois. One was a woman, an older student with young children, who drowned her young children in their bathtub. The community was reeling. Later a woman I knew, professional, the wife of a doctor, killed one of her two children, but didn’t succeed with the other. She had been sinking further in her depression, and told someone (her own doctor) that she felt she was sucking mud. That’s how bad it was. I wonder about the person who killed these children, but with that person there was not only despair perhaps but an all encompassing hate. It reminds me of Milton’s Satan, who, having no hope, declares “Evil be thou my good” and dedicates himself to destroying what God created.

I’m so overwhelmed with sadness, but my rabbis tell me despair is not an option. Perhaps because it leads to death, or at least to succumbing, when we need to work and do what we can, to make the world better. It is what is called Tikkun Olam, but it is also what Milton was talking about at the end of Paradise Lost. I am about to start the semester (God or the universe willing), and I will be teaching Milton to young people, undergraduates, and once again I have to try to give them hope, keep them strong, and teach ethical values as well as literature. Soon I will be teaching Milton’s poem Lycidas about the inexplicable death of a young promising person, Edward King (who he calls by a pastoral name, as if he were a shepherd). Perhaps Milton was not personally close to him, but this young promising person stands in for all deaths of people in their youth, especially deaths by inexplicable violence. Milton’s poem is filled with images of violence as he describes death in a shipwreck, but he also questions: where were the gods who should have saved him? All of these things will make the poem feel very present as we talk about it, look at it in detail. I will not avoid its present significance, and I am sure not only I but my beloved students will tear up. At the end of the poem, the voice changes and we see the poet/narrator rise up and prepare to go to “fields new.” To go on to live, not sink in despair, but to go on and do something as yet undetermined but necessary.

I can’t get this school shooting out of my mind, and maybe I shouldn’t. Things won’t get better in America (if it will) until there are no longer more guns than people, until military-style and automatic guns are outlawed (and confiscated). Wouldn’t it be nice if the president would make an Executive Order about that?