A review by gorecki
All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt
5.0
There is a theory that from an evolutionary point of view, happy memories are not useful to us. That’s why we need to consciously work at remembering them, while at the same time we’re unable to forget the bad ones. Bad experience is useful because it helps us survive - we’re supposed to learn from it and know better next time.
But then when it comes to sad moments, hard moments, bad moment, ones that weigh us down, we’re always told to “let them all out”, to let go. Those experiences might be evolutionarily helpful lessons, but they’re a heavy burden to carry. The irony? We learn to survive from them, but we don’t often survive them to learn.
Love is a form of happiness we all want to cherish, but sometimes it has a dark undercurrent that drags us down to the very bottom. All Down Darkness Wide is the struggle between the two - between the need to keep the memory of a happy love alive while also letting all its darkness out so you can float back up and break the surface for air. Of learning to live again, even if only to live surrounded by ghosts.
We’re always smarter in hindsight. We see all the signs of things unavoidably collapsing around us only once we’re already standing on top of the rubble. And so does Hewitt, standing on top of what remains of his love for Elias, on top of the poetry of others who have walked similar paths before him, on top of some of the most poetic prose I’ve read in a while. Connecting love and darkness across centuries and countries, tying in the suffocating feelings of being a closeted gay boy in a small town and that of a love gone dark to the freeing feeling of coming out and swimming up from the bottom of that love to resurface again.
It might be just me, but I felt it. I felt him stand on top of this rubble and take his deep gulp of air and reclaiming himself from his ghosts. And then “a lantern moves along the night.”
But then when it comes to sad moments, hard moments, bad moment, ones that weigh us down, we’re always told to “let them all out”, to let go. Those experiences might be evolutionarily helpful lessons, but they’re a heavy burden to carry. The irony? We learn to survive from them, but we don’t often survive them to learn.
Love is a form of happiness we all want to cherish, but sometimes it has a dark undercurrent that drags us down to the very bottom. All Down Darkness Wide is the struggle between the two - between the need to keep the memory of a happy love alive while also letting all its darkness out so you can float back up and break the surface for air. Of learning to live again, even if only to live surrounded by ghosts.
We’re always smarter in hindsight. We see all the signs of things unavoidably collapsing around us only once we’re already standing on top of the rubble. And so does Hewitt, standing on top of what remains of his love for Elias, on top of the poetry of others who have walked similar paths before him, on top of some of the most poetic prose I’ve read in a while. Connecting love and darkness across centuries and countries, tying in the suffocating feelings of being a closeted gay boy in a small town and that of a love gone dark to the freeing feeling of coming out and swimming up from the bottom of that love to resurface again.
It might be just me, but I felt it. I felt him stand on top of this rubble and take his deep gulp of air and reclaiming himself from his ghosts. And then “a lantern moves along the night.”