On Hope

borrowing happiness from the time to come

I am starting a new Interintellect series (part of a Western Canon series: Joseline Yu is covering Sir Gawain in a couple of weeks.)

I’m covering Shakespeare, Austen, Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde. The first salon is June 6: Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings.

Also, if you aren’t sick of listening to me on podcasts, I did a short interview with Brian L. Frye, which was a lot of fun.

---

On Hope

every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from the time to come
Samuel Johnson, Rambler 203

We are happiest when hopeful, perhaps only then. Hope is the belief that the blur of our lives will be resolved on some far out horizon—something else awaits.

There is no such thing as permanent satisfaction. Appetites renew, work falls undone, life accrues in rust and dust. New bread must be baked every day. A creature evolved to have far more intelligence than it needs for mere survival needs more to do with its surplus endowment of understanding than to elaborate more appetites. More complex, nuanced, individuistic pleasures are insufficient. Our work is never done and enjoyments are never enough. We must have hope.

Told that anyone was happy, or thought themselves so, Samuel Johnson would cry out, “It’s all cant, the dog knows he is miserable all the time.” He also said, with more consideration, that we find consolation in the idea of the future. Recalling the harmless frolick, honest festivity, lucky accidents, defeated opposition, and dangers encountered in youth brings pleasure to middle age. But, the people we shared youth with are older too, or dying, or dead. The older we get, the more that chimes at midnight are recalled with a sense of shortening time. Joy is the defiance of time, the hope of futurity.

A sudden loss upsets us not just for the absence of a loved person, animal, or object, but because it ends all hope of that particular future thus narrowing our own future hopes. Grief is the feeling that nothing more can be anticipated. To be accommodated without taking over the house of our mind, an old grief must live harmoniously with new hopes.

The static state is so unfavourable because it needs maintenance but has no embellishments of hope. Political despair grows like a weed, requiring the sweat of survival without any renewal. Hope is not optimism. Hope, as Vaclav Havel said, is a state of mind; optimism is a state of the world. “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit… It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Writing about towns whose “principal supporting business now is rage” the poet Richard Hugo advised “Say no to yourself”.

The car that brought you here still runs.   
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver   
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Hope does not arrive like the morning dew or the evening stars. It must be found. It must be worked on. As Seamus Heaney wrote in his elegy for Robert Lowell, the way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. Even Johnson admitted, “there is yet happiness in reserve, and that hope which we can be sure will not deceive us, is the chief blessing of mankind.”

It is up to us to make sense of ourselves, to live and work in a way that is neither optimistic nor naive—but is hopeful.