Mythology is a tricky thing, because it never gives one convenient answer. Take the story of Pandora's box. According to Hesiod's classic version, when curiosity got the better of her, Pandora released all sorts of evils into the world: disease, death, famine. When she finally closed the lid, only hope remained at the bottom.
Hesiod thought it was the cruelest joke of the gods. Hope makes us build, plan, and love someone in a world that specializes in destruction and chaos. It's the same thing that makes us rise after falling, only to fall again.
Friedrich Nietzsche later completed this idea, writing that hope is the worst of evils, because it only prolongs human suffering. There are days when it's hard to disagree with him.
But there is another, less popular Greek fable. In it, everything is the other way around: the jar contained not misfortunes, but blessings. When humanity opened it, all these blessings, capable of turning life into paradise, simply evaporated. Only one thing remained – hope.
I suspect that both John R. R. Tolkien and the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel would subscribe to the second version.
Graphs of our crises
Kurt Vonnegut, known for Slaughterhouse-Five, liked to draw “story graphs” in his free time. He argued that all plots follow certain curves. The formula of a fairy tale according to Vonnegut is simple: everything is bad, then it gets a little better, then a catastrophe occurs that destroys everything to the ground. And then there is a sharp turn, a miracle, an ending, where everyone lives a long and relatively happy life.
Tolkien would probably nod approvingly when he saw these graphs. For him, the main element of any story was the final denouement, a sudden escape from a dead end. He even invented a term for it – “eucatastrophe”. That is, a good catastrophe. An unexpected and joyful turn of the plot, when it seemed that everything was finally lost.
The Lord of the Rings couldn't end with the hobbits dying somewhere in the mud and Sauron successfully building his orc empire (although, looking at modern geopolitics, such a scenario seems quite realistic).
No Disney birds
There is one caveat here. It is not all about escaping from reality. Tolkien was not a naive boy, he went through the Somme and knew what a real meat grinder looks like. He did not try to convince us that the world is a continuous meadow with elves and friendly grandfathers in hats. Suffering is full. Nightmares are enough to the head. But eucatastrophe is the joy of liberation that simply ignores all the evidence that the world is rolling into the abyss.
The original Grimm fairy tales were dark: with cannibalism, cruelty, and a lack of Disney-like morality. But the mark of a good fairy tale is something else. When that same twist comes, you get a lump in your throat somewhere, and for a second you believe that it all made sense.
Stubbornness instead of optimism
Gabriel Marcel, it seems, had never read Tolkien, but he was thinking the same thing. What one called eucatastrophe, another called simply hope.
According to Marcel, hope is not an infantile “everything will be fine, just smile.” It is an affirmation. It is the confidence that there is some design in the world, some principle that keeps us on our feet. It is the ability to look at broken things, at fatigue, at statistics and the mathematical probability of disaster, and stubbornly refuse to admit that this is the end.
Hope is not about optimism at all. Optimists are often the first to break when their expectations are shattered by reality. Hope simply says, “No, this is not the end. Everything will fall into place eventually.”
It is impossible to negotiate with the darkness or bargain for some peace from it. It is not affected by rational arguments. Therefore, the only thing left for us in the face of this absurdity is to stubbornly and a little arrogantly keep our own little hope inside.
Share
Subscribe to UkrMedia on Telegram.
⚡ Readers' Pulse
Is hope for you an engine that keeps you afloat, or a trap that only prolongs the torment?
0 people have already voted. Join the discussion.
🕯️ This is my power ⛓️ This is a useless illusion 🧩 Everything is confused
☝️ First choose your position
✏️ Write a comment
📊 Mind map
🕯️ This is my power 0% ⛓️ This is a useless illusion 0% 🧩 Everything is confused 0% 💡
The discussion is just beginning. Be the first to comment!
Comments
New ones first ↕
There are no comments yet. Be the first!