Hope
Hope is a casual acquaintance of faith, indifferent to any sensible forecast—“The Soviet Union will last for five hundred years “—and possessed of uncanny confidence—or merely foolish or desperate or perverse or blind. Sunlight skimps through a distant tall window in a vast stone-wall prison. Hope seizes that fraction and invents a story that explains suffering and believes in suffering’s passing. On a good day, a day when the strain of uncertainty is bearable, hope is confident. On a bad day, a day when the strain is too much, hope mumbles: “I hope she gets better. I hope you find a new job. I hope you meet a man who loves you. I hope the war will be over soon.” Idly, hope pushes a broom around the floor. There is too much emotional litter. There is too great a discrepancy between needing and getting. The word impossible floats overhead, a miserable, stagnant cloud.
In modern times, hope has had to be particularly resourceful. As external control has increased—turn the switch and the machine starts up—inner matters have tried to emulate that situation. No one spoke previously of human beings being “functional” and “dysfunctional.” More moral words might be applied or simply derogatory words but not such cold, analytical words. Hope is bound to seem, in such environs, helplessly amateur. The sigh that usually accompanies hope, that little wishful breeze, is bound to seem puny.
The notion of progress, whether technological or political, is the superannuation of hope. Although several recent American political campaigns played mightily on hope, reducing the word to a cipher, an indication that our yearning still somehow mattered, it was hard to say, amid the reckonings of money, marketing strategies, and power, where and how. The ever tattered quality of hope lent a particular poignancy to a realm—politics—not noted for poignancy. The reduction of hope to a slogan showed how far hope had fallen. The notion of hope as some sort of force in life was pleasing. Perhaps we should believe in the candidate who recognizes that force.
To be cynical is easy. The proverb of central and eastern Europe is wonderfully blunt: “Hope was born stupid.” Yet hope sustained untold millions in modern times and continues to sustain millions. The title of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of the Stalinist era says it all: Hope against Hope. Even in the direst corner, inner space will take root—no matter how maligned that space may be. Clamorous progress in its political manifestations and justifications, whether American sloganeering or Soviet ideology, has been a war on mere untutored humanity, those who wish to be left alone to tend their fields, observe their sacraments, and bury their dead with some degree of dignity, those who are glad to dwell where they are and not pursue some myth of forwardness. Their peasant hopes were mocked by such a proverb as I have cited (and that peasants themselves cited), yet those hopes were part of the fabric of life—to hope it will rain or stop raining, to hope a child will grow up sturdy, to hope to live another year.
To commandeer hope for social and political and economic purposes is to propose an unlikely degree of human efficacy. Hope, after all, is not automatic—far from it. On the other side of hope—and just as palpable—is despair, the feeling that nothing will work out. Despair is no more rational than hope, but may seem so since despair can see failure, whether it be social or personal, with a dark clarity. The unyielding nature of various malign human affairs—slavery, tyranny, vendetta, war, human trafficking—has given despair plenty of opportunity. Yet despair thrives on narrowness: nowhere to turn, nothing to believe, no one to trust. Despair thrives on corrosive mockery. Despair sees through every expedient ruse, every empty, well-meaning speech. What frightens is that the mockery may be well grounded. Hell is hell.
Life is largely middling, the biological condition of going from day to day and performing those functions that sustain existence. Modern times, as they have exalted excitement (hoopla, buzz, newest and latest, etc.) be it in the spheres of politics, art, or entertainment, have had little use for the middling. Hope and despair remain too fundamental to be thrilling. They stand like coaches on the sidelines of human events, watching and imploring in their very different ways. A little drama goes on in every human being between those two inclinations. For all the exaltation that may accompany hope and the bleakness that may accompany despair, they are mundane entities, part of the medley of daily confusion. They cannot be improved upon.
The political prisoner dies. The innocent man or woman remains in jail. The long suffering patient does not get better. The lover does not return. The crops burn up. A door does not open. A phone does not ring. A voice is not heard. Hope languishes. Despair laughs its desperate, rueful laugh. We recall the soon-to-be-murdered Desdemona saying, “But yet, I hope, I hope.”
Who can blame hope for succumbing to the derision of time and giving up, accepting that nothing will change or change for the worse? Though often typecast as a sort of Pollyanna, hope in modern times has had to take the measure of seemingly unimaginable horrors. Genocide dwarfs both hope and despair. One great crime of modern times is the abolition of human measurement—making a human life into something worthless. We can’t blame God or nature or fate for the murderous ideologies, destruction of environments, proliferation of arms, and untrammeled greed that have anesthetized us to the point of living unfeeling lives.
Hope waves a fraught banner in modern times on which the word human is written. It means the word—how could it be otherwise?—but knows how badly people can act. Nonetheless, people can be decent to one another. People can refuse to indulge in hatreds. People can take care of themselves and other creatures in simple, sustaining ways. Hope brims with affirmative visions. They may even be real.
This reminds me of something a friend of mine once said: judging someone in a moment of time is like having a Polaroid of them and imagining that this piece of information will tell you anything of any duration about them. Could the same be said of other snapshots we take of reality. Things change, I hope so…
Hi Baron, I much enjoyed your essay on Hope. It made me think of a hymn my mother often played and sang in the days of my fathers’ many hospitalizations for mental illness. It was called Whispering Hope. I just googled the words. Thank you for these thought-provoking essays.