Somewhere around this time of year, the song, and the tune, come into my head: “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan; earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

It seems to sum up the reasons, often inexplicable to outsiders, why those of us who choose to live in Maine do so. It’s not for everybody, but for us, it works.

I’d just returned from Washington, a city I know well but one that seems increasingly unreal each time I visit. Two decades after the attack on the Pentagon, and the threatened attack on the Capitol, the steel barriers are still up, with guard posts and sentries blocking many of the paths by which one once wandered up to the American seat of government, and power.

The razor wire around the Capitol is gone, and the Christmas tree is up, but it’s hard to look at the western front without imagining scenes from the Jan. 6 attack.

Yet the museums are open, with masks, and, outside the White House, tourists and young urban dwellers lounge and chat, as a few vehicles crawl through the security entrances. Life goes on.

I was taking my own research excursion into the distant past, a time of turbulence marked by extraordinary growth and equally extraordinary conflict, as the nation continued to struggle to emerge from a civil war’s aftermath, and – somehow figure out how to be one people.

We know now that the reunion, such as it was, came at the price of excluding many, a price we are still reckoning. And today, as the legislative branch continues to labor behind the Capitol’s walls, there’s a seemingly inexplicable lack of progress in addressing the nation’s urgent needs.

At such times, it may be meaningful to return to dark times, when the future wasn’t known, and the outcome still in grave doubt.

I took some comfort from reading Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis,” his pamphlet published in the first December of the Revolution. It wasn’t nearly as popular as “Common Sense” a year earlier, which helped spur the Continental Congress into declaring independence from the British king, and all kings.

Many, in fact, were close to despair and, as Paine put it, the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” had vanished. Paine could not have known that General Washington was about to pull off brilliant stratagems at Trenton and Princeton that would save the day, but in a way, he foresaw it.

One thinks of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the loneliest man on Earth, in the White House the first winter of the Civil War, facing an uninterrupted string of military defeats and an increasingly shaky Union. He, too, must have wondered, as he said later at Gettysburg, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

My parents’ generation lived through the darkness following Pearl Harbor, when Nazi armies stood astride Europe, and American forces were thrown steadily backwards across the Pacific. We have enshrouded World War II in too many myths since then; suffice it to say this was a grim, world-wide conflagration that cost more lives than almost all the wars before and since.

And for me, the darkest moment may have been the end of 2002, when it became clear that the Iraq war resolution, passed by overwhelming congressional majorities despite scant evidence or convincing reasons, would indeed launch an invasion early the next year.

Many have said we didn’t know, or couldn’t have known, the truth, but many of us did, nonetheless, understand immediately the epic nature of our mistake. Fear swept away reason, as is has too often before.

A pandemic bears little resemblance to a war between human actors, true enough. But the same currents of doubt and fear swirl, and the life-saving solution to the problem is caught up in the same waves of mistrust.

If only we knew how it would all come out, if we had reassurance that, after terrible death and suffering, there would be a better day ahead for all of us.

But we can’t know this, just as we can never know the future, no matter how many confident and self-assured predictions are issued.

What we have, then, is hope – a thin and fragile reed in the darkness, with the sun dipping to its lowest point in the northern sky. We must pray that it is enough.

Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, commentator and reporter since 1984, is the author of three books. His first, “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible,” is now out in paperback. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net

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