Something Intellectual

I write here chiefly about hope. 

If you were to ask ten people off the street to give a synonym for hope, my guess is “desire” or “wish” would be the number one response. These are certainly elements of the word, and in some senses they work as substitutes. We often talk of our “hopes and dreams” as vague, indefinite possibilities that may or may not take place in the distant future. We say things like “I hope the Cubs win the World Series” or “I hope Lindsay Lohan will get her act together,” happenings we would most definitely like to see take place, but that we readily admit to being unlikely. Sometimes we even express desires that are exaggerated far beyond anything we actually want, e.g. “I hope all your dreams come true” or “I hope you burn in hell.” In each of these instances, “desire” or “wish” could easily replace the word “hope” and none of the meaning would be lost. 

However, I would suggest that all of the examples mentioned above merely represent one side of hope -- that of want. There is another, equally fundamental aspect -- that of expectation. This side is much more apparent when we say things like “Don’t give up hope” or “There is still hope.” What we mean is, “Don’t give up your expectation for good to win out in the end” or “We still have reason to expect some good to come of this.” When we put our hope in something, we are not talking about some vague desire or wish concerning that thing. We are expressing some kind of belief that it, whatever it may be, will help us or deliver us -- at the very least positively affect us -- in some way. 

Concerning our readings of the past few days, I was struck by the utter lack of hope found in the poetry of Hardy and Housman. As Dr. Jacobs pointed out, the event of the Great War accounts quite readily for the despair found in the writings of Owen, Graves, Jones, and the other war poets. But Hardy and Housman wrote before 1914. As British citizens, they were members of the greatest empire of their time, a time in which human achievement seemed to be at its zenith and civilization itself had reached a balance rarely if ever before seen in the history of mankind. Historians refer to the era between 1815 and 1914 as “Britain’s Imperial Century.” It would seem that these poets had no reason for the pessimism they exhibit in nearly every selection in The Norton Anthology.

To set this hopelessness in even sharper relief, while studying these poems I was simultaneously reading C.S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory,” much of which addresses hope, both as a human impulse and a specific part of Christian doctrine. He writes of the human impulse, “We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.” Here Lewis describes the sort of wishful and desirous hope briefly explored in my first paragraph. In a very cosmic sense, he argues that it is a hope that all of mankind shares. 

Pondering this, I could not help but think of Hardy’s lines in “Hap,” which read, 

If but some vengeful god would call to me 

From up the sky, and laugh, ‘Thou suffering thing’ 

[. . .] Then I would bear it, clench myself, and die. 

Hardy is here asking for the very thing Lewis says we all “pine” for-- acknowledgment. But even as he expresses this desire, he crushes it, mourning, “But not so,” and goes on to reject the idea of any power but Fate being in control of the universe. Simply put, though he may indeed pine for this recognition, he scorns any hope of actually obtaining it.

In “He Never Expected Much (On my Eighty-Sixth Birthday)” Hardy goes even further. He writes of an apostrophized World, 

‘I do not promise overmuch, 

Child; overmuch; 

Just neutral-tinted haps and such’

You said to minds like mine.

This passage, while beautiful in a melancholy way, stirred up strong feelings of opposition in me. Because the world does promise much! Yet Hardy would have us believe that we have no right to expect anything of the world, of life itself. He may claim that he never expected much, but he seems to imply that he never desired much either. Unlike in “Hap,” he expresses no anger or dissatisfaction with the world. He even tells it, “you have kept faith with me.” I have a hard time believing him. Perhaps by his 86th birthday he had seen too much disappointment and gotten too accustomed to hopelessness to remember, but I can’t help but believe that he once knew of the “inconsolable secret in each one of [us]” that Lewis writes about-- “the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; [ . . .] the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it”.

Perhaps I only want Hardy to have felt this desire. Because I have felt it, I do feel it, I cannot imagine not feeling it. But if I am right, if Lewis is right, if everyone shares this secret longing, how did men like Hardy and Housman grow so skeptical about the world? I wonder if it might have something to do with the Romantic and Existentialist movements that preceded them; with Wordsworth finding solace from loneliness in a “host of golden daffodils” that make his heart dance; or Whitman discovering meaning in the fact that “the powerful play goes on” and he will contribute a verse. For while these, too, are beautiful ideas, they stop short of satisfying our hunger for what Lewis calls “our own far-off country.” He addresses such ideas, writing, “These things -- the beauty, the memory of our own past -- are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.” Perhaps Hardy’s heart was broken.

Perhaps because the daffodils and powerful plays that supposedly satisfied secular poets of past eras merely frustrated Hardy, he grew to honestly believe that his desire, vague and unformed as it was, was itself was unreasonable. That a desire (much less a real, concrete hope) for anything beyond what we see in the here and now is unreasonable. Of course all of this is conjecture -- I claim no special knowledge on the inner workings of his mind. But even if I am wrong about Hardy, I know, we all know, people for which this is true. People who have heard too much about “the answer,” have heard dozens of different “answers,” from yoga to 42 to All You Need Is Love, and in the end reject not only the answers, but the question itself. People whose hopes have been dashed too many times, whether because they never get what they hope for or because they do and it turns out it isn’t all they’d hoped, and who decide that the solution is not to hope at all.

In fact quite the opposite is true. Our “inconsolable secret,” our longing for something beyond that which we know, is not unreasonable. The problem is it lacks the element of expectation. It is not specific enough, and not great enough, nor were the desires of the Romantics and Existentialists, though they may have claimed to have found them fulfilled in Nature. For what mankind truly longs for, and what Christians openly hope for, the only thing that will satisfy our hunger, is “To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son -- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.” And if we realize this, and embrace it, difficult though that may be (Lewis certainly found it so), we will come to understand that though we yearn for it our whole lives and never find it here on earth, this is simply because, as Lewis explains, “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.” Suddenly our vague desire for an undefined “something” turns into an eager expectation of the future glory to come. It turns out to be exactly as Paul wrote: “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1b). And whatever Hardy may have written at 86, I look back at his earlier poems and see traces of this yearning in him, whether he ever admitted it outright or not. How else could he ever have written the last stanza of “The Darkling Thrush,” which responds to a bird’s “full-hearted evensong,” saying, 

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.