The Difficult Question of Hope, or Twilight and Civilization

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Scarcely a a day goes by that it doesn’t happen. A message, a phone call, a missive. From old friends, new ones. The other day, it was an old colleague I hadn’t heard from in years.

Hey. Just give us some…give us some hope.

And I pause. I take a breath.

Is that my job?

Is it even something I have to give?

Is It My Job to Give You Hope?

I examine this question. I look at it intently. I peer its angles, glittering darkly in the twilight (we’re about to get to that.) I search its hidden crevices, testing for weaknesses, looking for a way in.

Any way in.

But it hangs there before me.

A black cube, spinning, hovering in the air before me.

Is it taunting me?

Give me hope, give me hope. Give us hope, give us hope.

I hear the refrain coming from inside it. Somehow. But the cube is just a cube, perfectly formed. It admits no light. Nothing penetrates it.

What am I do with it?

The Cube (Follows Me Everywhere I Go)

It follows me everywhere I go, the cube.

There I am, sipping a coffee, Snowy grinning up at strangers from my heels. “Hello, you’re Joe, right?” It’s a well-dressed man, who knows me by the name I use at the cafe. We begin talking, about the economy, finance, his career in banking, New York, the world.

And out of the corner of my eye, I see the cube spinning.

There, as he speaks, between his words, I hear it whispering.

Give me hope, give us hope.

Sometimes it screams, sometimes it roars, sometimes it keens. But it never falls silent.

And it never leaves me alone, this object, this form, this question, this thing made of entreaties and pleas, all the same.

And over the years, as I’ve grown feeble, becoming an old man, I’ve come to begin to resent it.

Those are terrible words. How can you resent a plea? What business do you have feeling such a way at it? Ugly, stupid words, and immoral ones, too. Resentment is an excuse for inadequacy.

I understand that I’ve been morally corroded along the way, too. I don’t have the strength, anymore, to do with this plea what one should do with pleas.

The decent thing, the kind thing.

At least offer some consolation. Offer something, pitiable, hollow, but something.

Instead, I find myself lost in questions. Sometimes, a flash of anger surges in me.

Hey, why is it my job to give you this thing called hope?

Why do you imagine I have much of it to offer you?

How am I to know what it is?

Surely, I can’t give you something I don’t have myself.

But these are indecent thoughts. They’re childish, mean, vulgar. They belittle me as I have them. I feel ashamed of myself for thinking them. I dispel them, with what little strength I have left. I am an adult. I am not a boy anymore. I don’t know if I’m a man. But whatever I am, I must be better than this.

Yet that only brings me back to where I began. Homer’s heroes completed their journeys. They made their twisted, tangled ways home. Me? I end up back where I began.

Facing this cube. Which follows me everywhere.

Questions and Answers About Hope

After I stop trying to play this feeble, cheap game of trying to ignore the cube, after I snap at it, after I lash out at it, I try to…understand it.

I ask the cube my own questions. I’ve told you some already. How can I give you hope?

Here, you can take everything I have. Take my words. Take my thoughts. Take my voice, my heart, my blood.

This is all I have to give you. What more can you ask of me?

Don’t you see how indecent this is? To ask a man, standing there foolishly in the killing sunlight, for something he can’t give?

The cube never answers me.

It says, over and over again. Wails, whispers, calmly intones.

Give us hope, give us hope.

I stand before it. This is my condition. Remember what they taught you in English class? Man against the world. Man against man. Man against himself.

Which one is the cube?

Is it the human condition? Is it us against me? Is it me against everyone? Am I, too, inside the cube, in my heart of hearts, desperate for hope?

Am I the only person in the world who can live without hope? Sipping my coffee and smoking my cigarettes in contempt of this most human of pleas? Am I the only one on this earth who’s not a wretch, made of mud and soil and dirt? So I, too, must be the cube. It must be made of my pleas, too.

As much as I play this game of pretense. As much as I tell you I stand alone, above, beyond, against hope. What a foolish thing to have ever believed.

The cube hovers there. It’s finally stopped asking. Now that I’ve admitted this much, that I, too, am just another wretch, looking for salvation, anywhere, in the stars, in the cities, in the dust. And never finding it.

There, behind the cube, I see a figure. He wears a hood. He carries a scythe. He smiles at me, like a father. Welcome home, my son, he says. Time comes for us all.

Lies And Hope in an Age of Ruin

Let us talk about hope now, that I’ve told you how it makes me feel.

Here’s the truth. It terrifies me. This question, the cube, how it follows me around. All of it.

I understand I’ve created this plight for myself. Hope, hope, hope. I pretended too long that hope wasn’t something human beings needed. Even, especially, me.

And so now I kneel before the cube.

I say:

Let me tell you what you want to hear. There is hope everywhere. See that politician? And that one? Why, they are here to offer us all hope. They will solve it for us! The difficult question of hope.

But when I do this, the cube pulses. A low hum comes from it. It turns red. It accuses me.

It knows I’m lying.

I plead back with it. Let me tell you what you want to hear. We need this thing called hope, so let us just make it up. Fabricate it, out of whole cloth. Where’s the sin in that? We live on little lies. Look at these shoes, this jacket, this logo—this makes me a better person than you! So where’s the problem in a little white lie about something so necessary?

The cube flashes red and violet, red and violet. It knows, and I do, too. The deeper the impulse, the graver the lie.

It doesn’t want me to lie. It wants something deeper from me, in me, through me, of me.

Here, I say weakly, look. There is always hope! This too, shall pass. The world is troubled, true. But so what! In just a few years, all will be well. And if it’s not, well, we’ll endure. We’ll endure it all. The hate, spite, violence, greed. The fear, trauma, despair. And we will emerge on the other side. There, isn’t that hope?

The cube turns white. Not a pleasant white. The white of bones. Teeth. The white of a sky before a tornado rips apart the fields of wheat.

This is worse than a lie, I understand. It’s folly. Hope isn’t just enduring suffering. The very idea of it is about an intercession. Without that, why do we live at all? Camus’s famous question: why do we endure at all, instead of taking our own lives, realizing the terror and stupidity of our plight?

I grit my teeth. If I can’t lie, if I can’t sweep the problem away, what does the cube want from me?

What hope is it asking me for?

The Twilight and the Night (of the Human Journey)

I pause, and begin to answer, hesitantly, slowly.

This is the twilight. The day is done. And the night is falling.

For our civilization. Our old paradigms and ways are over now. They have served their purpose—see the fields, stained with blood, see history’s scars etched upon our backs.

Now we are here in the twilight. And in that twilight, there’s gloom. The sun is setting. A gray light hangs over all.

The sun will rise again. But only after the night has passed.

This is our civilization.

We haven’t endured night before.

In the day we’ve been alive, we climbed out of a rift in a valley. That was the morning. By the midday, we’d built mighty empires, glittering with iron and gold. And blood. By the time the hung lower and lower in the sky, our engines roared with industry. Machinery hummed. Bands of light encircled the globe. Our kind built great crystalline towers, stretching into the skies.

But now it’s twilight.

And we are going to experience something we have never experienced before. A night.

A night is frightening. A night can be terrifying.

But a night is also a liberation. It is when we discover ourselves. When the stars sing to us, and guide us home.

In the night, what do we do? Have you ever thought about it? We cling to one another, asleep, dreaming. Understanding how to live, again, when we wake, a little better. We do that day after day. We try to grasp how to live a little better, again and again.

This is the purpose of the night. It is when we love, sing, cry, embrace, kiss. It’s when, asleep, we cling to one another, for salvation, as the world around us turns to what the rest of being is: darkness and dust.

This is what we are going to experience as a civilization.

Have you ever thought about how strange that is? We look and look for salvation, all day long. And in the night, there it is. It’s just us, clinging to one another, dreaming, loving. Learning how to live better.

This is who we are, and this what there is. This is where we are, in the journey of humankind, now, too.

The hand of time has written all this. Not I. With a scythe. Not a pen.

I fall silent.

Am I hoping, myself, now?

What Hope is to Me Now

The cube hovers before me.

It thrums. Is it thinking? Digesting? Absorbing? Wondering?

Those are all the words I have for you, I say, still kneeling.

I cannot offer you any more than that. But also I cannot offer you any less.

The cube spins. It glows. And then it begins to expand and expand.

Inside it, there’s nothing but the night. I see the stars glittering. I think of us, huddling around our fires. Beings of blood and pain. Suffering things. Wretches of mud and dirt. Seeking salvation, which we find, only, at last, ever, in the night, clinging to one another, the lesson forgotten again, as the day rises, as we try, struggle, desperately, to live a little better.

I am all this. You are all this. We are all this. All around me, the twilight falls.

The cube, now as tall as a door, is made of the night.

I walk in, and don’t look back.

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