Why These Are the Best of Times — Yes Now
A 40-year-old Styx song takes on new meaning, perfectly answering our times
Record numbers worry America is on the wrong track. All sides blame the other, saying they alone can change these worst of times.
So I walk the dog, praying as a forgotten Styx song pops into my head:
“I know you feel these are the worst of times,’’ Styx sings. “I do believe it’s true. When people lock their doors and hide inside. Rumor has it, it’s the end of paradise.’’
Search “Best of Times” on YouTube, and recent commenters agree the lyrics are about perfect right now (just as they were in that turning point time of 1980–81). Friends text the latest worrisome headlines or trends.
But Styx sang it first:
“The headlines read ‘These are the worst of times.’ I do believe it’s true. I feel so helpless like a boat against the tide. I wish the summer winds could bring back Paradise. But I know, if the world turned upside down. Baby, I know you’d always be around.’’
Of course, people aren’t always around. Babies grow up. People die.
The author of this Styx hit, Dennis DeYoung, was the lead singer of Styx during the band’s “best of times,” dumped by the rest of the group in 1999.
And as ’80s kids reach a certain age, many of our peers are dying, reminding us of our mortality.
Styx and DeYoung perform separately now. The pandemic even has family and neighbors seeing less of each other.
My former colleague and roommate, Associated Press journalism superstar Ted Anthony, recently penned a beautiful essay on aging, death, and “the lies of 1980s bubblegum music,” noting “We Did Not, in Fact, Build This City on Rock and Roll.” So true.
But as Starship also asked, “Don’t you remember?”
We lived only for the answers in a song. And sometimes, those “Keep It Simple,” straightforward answers offer the roads with the fastest route:
- Every time (including today) can feel like the worst of the times. History teaches us there were always others who had it much worse than we do.
- Depression is focusing too much on our past, anxiety is fixating on what might happen next, but the only moment we can change is the one we’re living in right now — at this very minute.
- So this time, this moment truly is the best time. It’s the only time you’ve been given, the only time you can do anything about — now or never?
- Culture, George Weigel teaches, actually trumps economics, ideology, and politics. We forget speeches but remember songs. We forget policies and financial statements but remember memes, jingles, and slogans.
- As Styx teaches, “the best of times” are those magical moments spent with a loved one or dear relative or friend: “Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime. We’ll take the best, forget the rest, And someday we’ll find…”
Around the same time “The Best of Times” came out; the same message (actually from 19th-century author Charles Dickens) played a vital part in the all-time classic, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
Admiral James T. Kirk, lamenting his sense of aging and loss, looks at the Dickens classic and reads aloud: “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’… Message, Spock?”
His best friend answers, “None that I’m conscious of …except, of course, ‘happy birthday,’ surely the best of times.”
Spock returns to the “best” theme later in the film, telling the 50-something Kirk, “If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for you to accept promotion. Commanding a starship is your first best destiny. Anything else is a waste of material.”
Perhaps that is the message of time as well: we focus on how bad times are now, how hopeless life seems, but we accept our challenges and act. Often, we look back at those hardest times years later as turning points that made us who we are.
Styx: Our sudden source of complete comfort?
I knew I had to look up that old Styx song, playing it while I got ready for my day. Afterward, YouTube advanced to the next Styx song the power of Google knew to be most appropriate, a song from 10 years later.
The next Styx song I heard came out in 1990, another one of those turning point years, and it would be the group’s last big hit:
“Every night I say a prayer in the hope that there’s a heaven. But every day I’m more confused as the saints turn into sinners.”
Those words also seem perfect today. When you hear debates about tearing down monuments, deleting history or culture, consider these lyrics:
“All the heroes and legends I knew as a child have fallen to idols of clay. And I feel this empty place inside, so afraid that I’ve lost my faith. Show me the way… Take me tonight to the river. And wash my illusions away.”
In “Eternity in the Midst of Time,” Wilfrid Stinnisen asks, “can time be our friend?”
“Man longs for the absolute, for wholeness, and, in practice, he attains only small fragments,’’ Stinnisen writes. “Everything in his life must happen gradually. He cannot even completely be himself. One can say of God that he is himself, that he is totally contained within himself. But man must leave himself in order to find himself. He does not recognize himself completely in what he is right now.
“Instead of being complete in himself, he is fragmented: he is pulled simultaneously toward the past and the future. He lives as though he were scattered abroad, as in a diaspora. One could even say he is a diaspora. It is his task to transform this multiplicity into a structured unity.’’
Time, the Romanian Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stăniloae explains, merely is God waiting for us.
Let’s return to “Show Me the Way,” the eighth and final top 10 single for Styx from 1990.
It’s yet another song I’d forgotten, yet another prediction of the anger we see from one side promising “a return to normalcy” and the other telling us they are the only ones stopping the mobs from tearing down civilization.
“… for a moment dreams are sacred,’’ Styx taught us. “I close my eyes and know there’s peace in a world so filled with hatred.
“Then I wake up each morning and turn on the news to find we’ve so far to go. And I keep on hoping for a sign, so afraid I just won’t know… Bring me tonight to the mountain. And take my confusion away.’’
