T(r)oy's Marbles
on hope
Since this is "The Year of Hope" for me, I have been reading a book called "The Experiment Hope" by the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. This passage struck me...
"Hoping does not mean to have a number of hopes at one's disposal. It means, rather hoping to be open. Despair does not mean to bury a few hopes here or to destroy a few illusions there, but to give up one's openness and thus oneself. To be in hope means to find oneself in a state of preparedness, not to commit oneself to what has passed by and not to tie oneself to wish-dreams, but to harmonize with the experiment which one himself is. In this sense, hope is not something which one man has and the other does not have, but is a primal mode of existing or the most important constituent of human life. Man hopes as long as he lives and, conversely, he lives in the liveliness peculiar to him as long as he hopes.
"The behavioral sciences have shown how every animal has its own kind of environment which belongs to it as the necessary externality of the internal side of its instincts. Birds need air in order to fly. Fish need water in order to swim...But man, so say some, is not bound to a definite environment. He is a world-open creature who himself can and must everywhere build his own environment in his cultures. And yet there is an element and an environment without which he cannot live as man, and that is hope. It is the breath of life."
quotes | Comments (0) | January 18, 2007