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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falconer cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”
- W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
These words have been uttered, and perhaps changed utterly by the fact that they have often been appropriated to modern-day political contexts. Tony Blair, for example, used the term to decry the risks of populism overtaking Europe. The often alluded to poem has been overused for politics, but it has also been used extensively for famous books in the English language, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Nick Tabor of The Paris Review called the poem the “most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English.”
But will that stop me from taking and pillaging from the poem for my own gain? Absolutely not. Because what the “center” is different for each society or each individual person. In 2008, Elyn Saks published a memoir titled The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, a book journaling Saks’s experience through chronic schizophrenia. The center, at a core, is a sense of stability, which is different for each individual.
We all have a center, and we all know the saying to hold onto the constants in our lives that won’t change. And what happens if that center breaks down, as has been…
