The king whose vanity and arrogance bring madness, death and destruction to himself and everyone around him. The corruption of language in service to a totalitarian state, a corruption so complete that words are meant to mean their opposite. The inexplicable ordeal of an ordinary individual: an extrajudicial process that drags him through an incomprehensible labyrinth with no rational explanation; a grotesque transformation that negates his very humanity. These archetypes are evidence of the social relevance of literature — of storytelling, of fiction — as a faithful representation of reality.

That’s why the banning and burning of books, the prohibition of free thought and speech, the demonization of universities, the purging of libraries, the criminalizing of creative imagination are typical of tyrannical regimes — and testimony to the dangerous power of art to reveal and subvert monolithic authority. The tragic and the absurd, the psychological and the existential, the philosophical and comical perspectives on human experience afforded by great writers turn some of their names into adjectives in our everyday lexicon: Shakespearean, Orwellian, Kafkaesque.

I suppose it is helpful, perhaps even in some way consoling, to recognize in this historical moment that what has befallen us is nothing new, that we’ve seen this movie before, that if we find ourselves in a melodrama not of our own making, at least we are not the first or the only ones to suffer such misfortunes, that there is a certain clarity and something like comfort, even encouragement, to be found in works that have endured through time. What feels unprecedented is perennial.

I’ve had some bad dreams lately, anxiety-riddled episodes whose details I don’t remember in the morning but they leave an uneasy residue that requires me to make a conscious choice not to be sucked into their vortex; to remind myself of my good fortune to have a home, friends, everyday pleasures, mild weather, music; that those bad dreams are only in my head and that, according to Elias Canetti, dreams are just the psyche’s way of taking out the garbage, that (contra Freud) they have no profound significance, so it’s a waste of time to try to discern their meaning.

But what about “I have a dream” per Dr. King, the dream as aspirational vision; the American dream of freedom and opportunity that has drawn so many millions of immigrants to these once-welcoming shores; the dreams of the DACA dreamers brought to this country as children by parents who bet their lives on that dream — such dreams are real-world motivators known to have saved lives. Just as my life has been made more livable by engagement with the physical yet dreamlike mysteries of poetry, of language distilled and lit from within to illuminate experience.

I’m figuring this out as I go along in search of words to describe what I can’t explain. Merely political terms are insufficient to convey the magnitude of the all-pervasive miasma enveloping us, the disorienting sensation of witnessing the disintegration of everything we understood as given, the disbelief that democracy could elect to destroy itself. Which must be why I’m reaching beyond journalism — essential as it is to the defense of our collective sanity — to texts with timeless insights that light up the devastated landscape with some kind of understanding, that convert the destruction and chaos to creation, to inspiration.

Shakespeare has never been my favorite playwright — I much prefer the cool compassion of Chekhov, the hopeful despair of Beckett, the brokenhearted pathos of Tennessee Williams — but our moment has the operatic grandeur of a Shakespeare tragedy mixed with the slapstick farce of Charlie Chaplin with his Hitler mustache, a wispy blond wig and a long red tie, barking on live TV from the Oval Office that due to the state of emergency our disbelief has been suspended.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.