Dancing in the street

Renaissance humanist writer Petrarch wrote of the sprit of the new era at its dawn. He observed that the Italian Renaissance amounted to a "period of light following a long night of Gothic gloom." The quote has stuck with me since my Western Civilization classes for its poignance both on an intellectual level and a deeply personal one.

We've done it. We've chosen a new and renewed path (Renaissance means "rebirth") after a long, bleak night. We, too, are experiencing, on a large scale, a rebirth of spirit. People are dancing in the streets, and not only within the United States. The world has been vocal in taking notice of the hard-fought change we've made in our country. I've read this story before. I read it in the joyous celebrations following the victory over the Axis in World War II, in the "we can do it" spirit that mobilized us for that war, in the renewed faith that led kept us holding our heads high during the Berlin airlifts, the Apollo missions, and even the national bicentennial celebrations after the Watergate affair.

So many people seem to want to believe Obama when he says with such confidence: "Yes we can." I felt the earth quake during that speech.

In the wake of the November 4th elections, the quote has become infinitely more personal for me. In fact, I recalled it in a moment both singular and euphoric as I watched Barack Obama come out to face the joyous, weeping crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, a crowd said to have balooned from 160,000 (only 60,000 of which fit inside the gates) to 200,000.

Although a very crude analogy, I'll attempt to explain not how these deeply different times are analogous, but why the quote comes to me in times of renewal. I link our collective journey through this gothic gloom has been linked both metaphorically and historically to that of the Europeans during the Gothic age. The art of sculpters like Gislebertus was wholly Biblical, and meat to inspire fear in all who passed beneath it to attend church. The works during this time were largely pre-perspective ones (no perspective meant that artificial perspective was used, or none at all, giving images a one-dimensional quality, iconic in nature) and they lacked the human element that was added on with the advent of perspective, beautiful rendering, and light and shadow.

People lived their lives in ignorance, following rules and rites they didn't fully understand (as the Bible had not yet been translated to a tongue most people spoke), the Black Plague swept through Europe, and daily occurrences that were not (yet) explainable struck terror into the hearts of Europeans (such as the appearance of a comet, later named by Sir Edmund Halley, in 1066).

Our country, too, has been through a Dark Ages, albeit a much shorter one. We've been through imposed fear, ignorance, judgment, and we've had our rights trampled on, and as I watched Barack Obama and his family triumphant, I remember thinking how much hope I'm putting into his administration after a long era of "Gothic gloom."