Cannot wait for this book, either.
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will
happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite
regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that
dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have,
though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not
predictable.
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a
lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident
memory of the future, in Gonzalez’s resonant phrase. Optimism is
similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not
acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and
that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans; hope like creative
ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative
Capability.
On a midwinter’s night in 1817, a little over a century before
Woolf’s journal entry on darkness, the poet John Keats walked home
talking with some friends and as he wrote in a celebrated letter
describing that walk, “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at
once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement,
especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
- Rebecca Solnit (my heroine)
descensus Averno facilis est