John Lachs on Death and Self-Importance

 

Hope

Hope is the subject of another terrific book by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark... and of today's eponymous poem by Lisel Mueller. "It is the singular gift/we cannot destroy in ourselves, the argument that refutes death, the genius that invents the future, all we know of God."

Solnit: “Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” And, "To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” And, “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

And, someone concluded his book on William James with:

Hope-the need for it, the possibility of it, the sense of it as the only reputable alternative to inadmissible despair-is the center of his vision as I see it. The prime requisite of hope is confidence that what we do matters and may make all the difference further along the chain of life. Meanwhile, conscience and hope command our respect for the immediately contiguous links who are our contemporaries, and sometimes command as well our intervention to secure their hold (which is also ours) on the communal life of our species. A chain really is no stronger than its weakest link, and James shared the Emersonian sense of life (expressed in the epigraph to "Nature") as a "subtle chain of countless rings." We are all vulnerable, fragile creatures, our luminous time here is brief, and we owe one another support and sympathy. "The truest vision of life I know," wrote Wallace Stegner, "is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark." But the hall's retention of light after our departure, for the use and enjoyment of later migratory transients whose way we have marked, can be our purpose and their deliverance. Meanwhile our human vulnerabilities will always exceed our personal "fortifications," says Anne Lamott, "so the only choice is whether you are most going to resemble Richard Nixon with his neck jammed down into his shoulders, trying to figure out who to blame, or the sea anemone, tentative and brave, trying to connect. . . ." James is with the anemones, and the larks. "What I like best about William James after all," Henry James scholar Sheldon Novick once told an online community of Jamesians, "is the relentless effort to express experience in ordinary language, as rigorous and coherent in its way as Emily Dickinson's poetry," and, in its way, as cheerfully restorative of life: "Hope" is that thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tunes without the words/And never stops at all."