The world is too much with us

One of the drawbacks of life in the 21st century is that we are intimate witnesses to history as it happens. My mother often told my brother and me that weeks and often months would go by before news of world and national tragedies would trickle into their small rural corner of Kentucky. They were shocked by these tragedies, of course, but they were spared the immediacy of the suffering and that made it easier to deal with. In our time, we turn on the television or computer and watch the horror and slaughter as it is happening. We bleed with the victims of a Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the dying after a terrorist attack on two New Zealand mosques, and now those who died in the Easter massacres that took place throughout Sri Lanka. Many people find it overwhelming. I am not sure human beings were meant to cope with so much heartbreak, but it is our fate to be born at a time when communication is instantaneous and modern technology makes mass murder far too easy. All we can do is to grieve for the loss of more innocents, offer prayers for their shattered families, and brace ourselves for yet more suffering.
Sorry to sound so bleak, but it is hard not to be pessimistic, given the sad state of our country and the world in general. So I seek refuge from reality in a fantasy television show that is even more violent than the world we live in or in the books I write, where the landscape is usually littered with bodies by the last page. Which is why I like that quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
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My Today in History post is late, as usual. April 23rd seems to have been a very popular day for significant events. In 1014, the Irish king Brian Boru was killed; Morgan Llywelyn wrote a novel about this remarkable man called The Lion of Ireland. In 1151, Adeliza of Louvain, the widow of King Henry I, died at the nunnery of Affigem. I always found her to be a sympathetic figure and was glad she had a second act after Henry’s death, wedding the Earl of Arundel and becoming a mother. She only appeared in one chapter in Saints, but she is a prominent character in Elizabeth Chadwick’s Lady of the English, sharing star billing with her stepdaughter and friend, the Empress Maude. In 1348, Edward III created the Order of the Garter. In 1445, the fifteen-year-old Marguerite d’Anjou wed Henry VI. William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616 and is traditionally said to have been born on this date in 1564. That wasn’t medieval, of course, but Will definitely deserves a mention. And I’ve always had a soft spot for Charles II, who was crowned on April 23rd in 1661.