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. Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)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 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). The thin line between agency and victimhood is drawn in how we tell those stories. The stories we tell ourselves about our private pasts shape how we come to see our personhood and who we ultimately become.
The stories we tell ourselves about our public past shape how we interpret and respond to and show up for the present. Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about these poles matter. In my own reflections on hope, cynicism, and the stories we tell ourselves, I’ve considered the necessity of these two poles working in concert. It was his way of honoring the same duality that artist Maira Kalman would capture 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,” wrote Albert Camus - a man who in the midst of World War II, perhaps the darkest period in human history, saw grounds for luminous hope and issued a remarkable clarion call for humanity to rise to its highest potential on those grounds.
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