Yuletide Greetings from Radio Lear
As the year turns inward and the days reach their darkest point, Radio Lear offers season’s greetings shaped by mid-winter’s enduring question of renewal. In King Lear, winter is not merely weather but ordeal. It strips away certainty, rank, and illusion, leaving the human voice exposed to wind, time, and consequence. Lear’s journey across the heath is a passage through loss toward a harder, humbler form of knowing.
British culture and mythology carry such scenes not as ornament, but as deep claims to belonging. They are not nostalgic relics but sedimented ways of making sense of endurance, authority, care, and failure. To know them is to stand within a long conversation rather than hover above it.
Yet, we now live in a fragmented and interconnected mythogenetic culture, where symbols circulate rapidly, detach easily, and are endlessly recombined. In such conditions, how do figures like Lear remain alive rather than flattened into reference or spectacle? What does it mean to keep faith with inherited myths without closing ourselves to the world they now travel through?
Perhaps the answer lies in depth rather than reach. To return to Lear is to dig into difficult ground, to stay with discomfort rather than displacement. In a society oriented around movement, acceleration, and surface exchange, such grounding can feel unfashionable. Yet it may offer something steadier: a footing from which imagination, listening, and renewal can begin again.
At mid-winter, radio remains a quiet companion. A place to listen across darkness, to hold old stories open, and to ask what they still ask of us.
