I am one of those embarrassing people who has a quote in the "favorite quotes" section of Facebook, and it's a paragraph from E.M. Forster's essay, "What I Believe." I put it there years ago and forgot about it until the Brexit vote happened, after which I remember somewhat drunkenly referring to it to try and comfort myself. While it is still a good encapsulation of what I myself believe, lately I'm finding it more aspirational than convincing or comforting. Paradoxically, the things that do still comfort me are poems I read at an impressionable age that range from abstractly melancholy—"The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin—to just absolutely sad as shit—"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" and "Erinna from Telos," both by Adam Zagajewski and translated by Clare Cavanaugh. What all of these have in common is a message that life is short and painful, but that it also comprises small moments of nearly ineffable beauty. Beauty doesn't redeem brutality, but knowing that there are, and have always been, people who stop to grieve pain and notice beauty, and try to communicate the experience to the rest of us, is somehow comforting. —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State