The Madness of Crowds

By Louise Penny

Some things were just inexplicable.

My hat’s off to Louise Penny for summing up all of 2020 (and 2021 I have to add) in five words. Inexplicable gives my brain a rest from trying to understand the experience of collective turmoil created by the pandemic.

Though she didn’t let my mind rest for long. Because it appears that Penny spent the pandemic pondering some larger issues raised by the viral threat. Issues about quality of life, value of life, and who decides how those things are defined. In The Madness of Crowds Penny created her most complex mystery story yet, interweaving current events, historic crimes and family secrets.

Amidst all of this she explores a different type of viral threat. The threat created and sustained when ideas, sinister and dangerous, are spread under the cover of well-intended solutions to the illusions of fear. How quickly these ideas can spread and take root. And how equally quickly a misguided ideology damages lives.

While reading, I pondered the question, what is that tipping point, when a new idea becomes a universally accepted practice. When the single drips of water end up filling the container and spilling over. She cleverly used the “hundredth monkey” principle as a symbol throughout the story to engage my thinking about my own current experience in this uncharted territory. (Sorry, if you want to learn about the “hundredth monkey” principle you’ll have to look it up. It’s a bit of a story to explain.)

The other question she provoked for me, is why is it that words—even well-intended words—can be twisted and redefined and land far afield from their original intent. As a writer, someone who works everyday for clarity and understanding through words, I find that question especially disturbing. It is not a new question. I suppose people have been doing this since the dawn of language. But for some reason, when played out in real time and repeatedly, through all of our various forms of media, it shines a an almost blinding light on our pervasive problem of truth-finding in a communications-saturated culture.

Finally, Penny also took me to the place of understanding that when facing a darkness, any darkness, we often survive for love. It is love that gets us through. And that I understand from deep experience. I continue to learn, that when Roy died, the love I felt for him did not die. It transformed. First as grief. But later, as a deep loving within me that I know is always there, perhaps like Divine love, always accessible, simply waiting for my attention and often brought forward in the most unlikely situations.

This is not a story for those who want clear, defined answers. It brings to mind some of my favorite lyrics by The Indigo Girls…”The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”

And always, when pondering the question “why” around any experience or observation I find inexplicable, returning to Rilke who gently reminds me to love the question. To live the question.

“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

It is too soon, says Penny, perhaps too soon to find resolution to this inexplicable experience. But perhaps, with Rilke’s patience, we can live into the questions.