I started to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story as a sort of distraction from the current U.S. political season and all of its noisy isolating polarization. It has turned out to be not a distraction, but an antidote.

For example, she describes her husband Dick’s change of heart regarding his own memoirs when he turned eighty and realized that the entire history of the nation was only “three Goodwins” long:

Dear friends, if we are lucky, we will be able to measure our lives in Goodwin-style lengths. Indeed, when I read that the first U2 album is closer in time to Pearl Harbor than today, I have to double check the math.

So much can happen,

much of it good,

some of it great.

If only we keep going.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

      – Seamus Heaney