There’s a strange parallel in recently returning to a book from the past, Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” and watching the media cover the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The fear of violence and the chaos of uncertainty in that faraway century are just as present in our culture as they were some 700 years ago.
Tuchman’s book, published in 1978, illustrates a picture of the 14th century that reads perilously similar to some aspects of life today. But a question that arises: How can we find peace or solitude in our current calamitous era?
