And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. The language in which we tell ourselves these stories matters tremendously, too, and no writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit does in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities ( public library).Įxpanding upon her previous writings on hope, Solnit writes in the foreword to the 2016 edition of this foundational text of modern civic engagement: The thin line between agency and victimhood is drawn in how we tell those stories. Ourselves about our private pasts shape how we come to see our Stories we tell ourselves about our public past shape how we interpretĪnd respond to and show up for the present. Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about these poles matter. I’ve considered the necessity of these two poles working in concert. In my own reflections on hope, cynicism, and the stories we tell ourselves, His way of honoring the same duality that artist Maira Kalman wouldĬapture nearly a century later in her marvelous meditation on the pursuit of happiness, where she observed: “We hope. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” wroteĪlbert Camus - a man who in the midst of World War II, perhaps theĭarkest period in human history, saw grounds for luminous hope andįor humanity to rise to its highest potential on those grounds.
0 kommentar(er)
