The dark forest of my walk was the umbrageous Cork Oak Plantation at the National Arboretum. With the leafy, characterful oaks (their bark so wondrously gnarled and wrinkled, like the skin of ancient elephants or of ancient newspaper columnists) so close together the forest's canopy casts (especially on overcast days) a magical gloom.

Of course the venerable Cork Oak plantation pre-dates the adolescent remainder of the Arboretum. Yet in the younger Arboretum one already sees some forests that promise to be magically, folklore-stokingly dark when they grow up.

Atlas Obscura's piece, timed to New Year's perfection, looks at how in mythology, especially Nordic mythology, a walk in a dark forest as the new year looms can grant the sensitive walker prophetic insights into what the coming year holds.

Certainly on my walk notions of what 2021 has in store bombarded me.

But, shelving them for the moment, I instead sing the praises of the National Arboretum. It is almost as visionary in its own way as the very vision of Canberra itself as it shimmered in the imaginations of the Griffins.

Well-read readers will be familiar with the quite modern notion of "cathedral thinking", the praiseworthy ability of leaders and designers and craftsfolk to embark on giant projects (such as the building of grand cathedrals) they know will never be completed in their own fleeting lifetimes. Some medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to build.

So perhaps we might in the same way and for the same reasons (and to congratulate our city for something so remarkable) speak of "arboretum thinking". The National Arboretum's creation has required a vision of what might be hundreds of years hence, long after its creators and their successors have gone the way of all flesh.

One wonders what history will one day find of today's terrible pandemic's influence on the arts and artists. Are today's creative folk, heartbroken, consciously and subconsciously creating grim and heartbreaking works?

I ask this because suddenly up loometh in the news some timely new thoughts about Shakespeare's plays and especially about his harrowing tragedy King Lear.

The Guardian reports that "The ravages of the plague are the true source of the dark sorrow driving Shakespeare's later work, a leading authority on the playwright has claimed - and were even behind his decision to change the traditional [upbeat] ending of the King Lear story for his own play.

"According to the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Greg Doran, the national trauma behind this masterpiece has always been hiding in plain sight.

After researching in Stratford-upon-Avon during lockdown, Doran is now convinced he has been guilty of ignoring the crucial impact of widespread bereavement on some of the greatest plays.

"'There is a big change in tone in his later work [and] experiencing the pandemic this year has made it clearer to me what lies behind it,' said Doran."

"'Shakespeare just could no longer write straightforward comedies, or give a happy ending to Lear. When it came to writing Lear in the 1600s, after all that death [from plague] again in 1603, he could not give the audiences a happy [ending]'."

I am a Shakespeare enthusiast and fancy that the sensitive theatre-goer is unlikely to ever forget his or her first experience of King Lear. Mere words cannot wield the matter of the merciless bleakness of it, of the way it ends with a storm of suffering that kills first the most admirable and blameless of women, Cordelia, and then (killing him with the grief the news of her death by execution has caused him) the most pitiable of men, Lear, her father.

Perhaps the play seems so shocking to those of us who are sensitively shockable because so much popular, sitcom-esque entertainment has a happy-ever-after, justice-triumphing-over-injustice, love-conquering-all Hollywoodery about it. And so, left emotionally unfit, soft and flabby by popular entertainments we go unsuspectingly to our first King Lear and are shaken by the emotional mercilessness of it. We leave the theatre what the tabloids would call "ashen-faced".

And yet, not terribly long before the pandemic made travel impossible in London I went to see a production of Shakespeare's tragic Hamlet (that play, too, ends in unrelieved misery) at The Globe. There I found the audience (overwhelmingly tourists and young people, probably fans of celebrity sitcoms) out and about in London determined on a jolly good time.

They wanted a laugh and so found the play quite a romp. Late in the play, as the bodies piled up, they, the audience, got quite a cackle from Queen Gertrude's horrified discovery that she has accidentally drunk poison and is about to die.

"No, no, the drink, - O my dear Hamlet - The drink, the drink! I am poison'd," Gertrude shrilled, the audience falling about with mirth as Gertrude fell down dead.

I writhed uncomfortably on my plain wooden bench seat and felt Shakespeare spinning in his grave at this proof that the modern mind struggles to appreciate profundity, at the sadness of his greatest play sometimes these days being a pearl cast before swine.