I was recently invited to take part in an online ´book club´ which three of my college friends and one of their sons had been doing for much of the past year. They were just finishing up Moby Dick when I joined in, then we read some C.R.L. James (his book about Moby Dick and his book about the Haitian Revolution). We have just now begun ready Thomas Carlyle´s The French Revolution. The following is something I wrote to my book buddies after this past weekend´s session.

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Dita and I will be spending a few days on the shoulder of Mt. Pisgah, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, up the mountain from Asheville. We´ll celebrate her birthday at a restaurant on the main square in Asheville, my brother coming from Los Angeles and my sister from Boulder to help us celebrate. Kipp, my basic  reaction to your ¨We’ve gotta have hope,¨ is to disagree kindly forcefully. (´Kindly´, up here in the Georgia hills, means ´fairly´.) But I´ve got to admit: we would not be celebrating Dita´s birthday were we not, each of us, hopeful in some way somehow. But, agreeing with Danny, how?

     The restaurant sits at the northwest corner of Asheville´s main square, Pack Square. In 1887, at the southeast corner of Pack Square, a man named William Oliver Wolfe, a stone cutter, set up a cemetery monument business. He soon married and the Wolfes proceeded to have several children, the last of whom was named Thomas.

     W.O. Wolfe embraced things with abandon, including whisky bottles. It seems his default mood was rage, which he often enough let manifest as beatings of Ms. Wolfe. She, in turn, was obsessed with making successful real estate investments and could put up with the chaos at home as long as her investments played out well. Generally put, it was what we today would call a ´dysfunctional family´ (few terms I dislike more!). 

     In 1904 Julia Wolfe moved to St. Louis, taking the children with her but leaving W.O. behind. It was the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, aka The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (Take Me to St. Louis, Louis! became a theme song for the fair). She thought she could make a killing by opening a boarding house there and renting rooms to Ashevillians visiting the fair. It also gave her welcome distance from W.O. and the drunken beatings. She turned a little profit, but not much. Late that summer, as the fair was wrapping up, one of Thomas´ older brothers caught typhoid, and died. W.O. came out to St. Louis to help Julia return the dead boy and the living others back to Asheville.

     All of this and more is related in Thomas Wolfe´s first novel, Look Homeward Angel. In preparation for our little Asheville trip, Dita and I have been reading the book, which, like Moby Dick, I had read decades ago and never until now revisited.

     So, here´s a passage from that book, a passage which speaks authoritatively to me, and which speaks about hope(lessness). And don´t be surprised if the passage almost seems like Melville. Struck by the echoes of Melville in Wolfe´s prose, I googled a bit and found this at ncpedia.com: ¨Thomas Wolfe spent most of his young life attempting to find normalcy. He found respite in the library where he read for hours. Tom devoured the writings of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Herman Melville.¨ Roundabouts 1910, when no one else read Melville!

     Now for the passage. It comes just as the Gant family (the pseudonym for the Wolfes in the book) is about to return home (Thomas Wolfe later famously coined the phrase You Can’t Go Home Again, the title of another of his novels). Eliza is the book name for Julia Wolfe. Gant, of course, is W.O. Eugene is Thomas, age six. Helen is one of his older sisters. Ben an older brother, Grover´s twin. Grover is the dead boy.

     Eugene was deep in midnight slumber. Some one shook him, loosening him slowly from his drowsiness. Presently he found himself in the arms of Helen, who sat on the bed holding him, her morbid stricken little face fastened on him. She spoke to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued voice, charged somehow with a terrible eagerness:

     ¨Do you want to see Grover?¨ she whispered. ¨He’s on the cooling board.¨

     He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was full of menace. She bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and carried him to the rooms at the front of the house. Behind the door he heard low voices. Quietly she opened it; the light blazed brightly on the bed. Eugene looked, horror swarmed like poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell that lay there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft eyes, that once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and suddenly recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not seen in weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

     Eliza sat heavily on a chair, her face bent sideways on her rested hand. She was weeping, her face contorted by the comical and ugly grimace that is far more terrible than any quiet beatitude of sorrow. Gant comforted her awkwardly but, looking at the boy from time to time, he went out into the hall and cast his arms forth in agony, in bewilderment.

     The undertakers put the body in a basket and took it away.

     ¨He was just twelve years and twenty days old,¨ said Eliza over and over, and this fact seemed to trouble her more than any other.

     ¨You children go and get some sleep now,¨ she commanded suddenly and, as she spoke, her eye fell on Ben who stood puzzled and scowling, gazing in with his curious old-man´s look. She thought of the severance of the twins; they had entered life within twenty minutes of each other; her heart was gripped with pity at the thought of the boy´s loneliness. She wept anew. The children went to bed. For a time Eliza and Gant continued to sit alone in the room. Gant leaned his face in his powerful hands. ¨The best boy I had,¨ he muttered. ¨By God, he was the best of the lot.¨

     And in the tickling silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.

     ¨I´ll never be able to forget his birthmark,¨ Eliza whispered. ¨Never, never.¨

     Then presently each thought of the other; they felt suddenly the horror and strangeness of their surroundings. They thought of the vine-wound house in the distant mountains, of the roaring fires, the tumult, the cursing, the pain, of their blind and tangled lives, and of blundering destiny which brought them here now in this distant place, with death, after the carnival´s close.

     Eliza wondered why she had come: she sought back through the hot desperate mazes for the answer:

     ¨If I had known,¨ she began presently, ¨if I had known how it would turn out —¨

     ¨Never mind,¨ he said, and he stroked her awkwardly. ¨By God!¨ he added dumbly after a moment. ¨It’s pretty strange when you come to think about it.¨

     And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity rose in them — not for themselves, but for each other, and for the waste, the confusion, the groping accident of life.

     Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his vanished youth, his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of so much of it; and he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows the gored chain may not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound, the done undone.

     ¨Ïf I had known. If I had known,¨ said Eliza. And then, ¨I´m sorry.¨ But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost.

     There you have it! Danny´s (and my) despair, alongside Kipp´s hopes, albeit suppliant to an unwitting spirit, but hopes all the same. And guess what? The Gant/Wolfe family lived on, heartily and even sometimes happily.

     Hope is an interesting word. Here’s the etymology: Old English hopian “have the theological virtue of Hope; hope for (salvation, mercy), trust in (God’s word),” also “to have trust, have confidence; assume confidently or trust” (that something is or will be so), a word of unknown origin. Not the usual Germanic term for this, but in use in North Sea Germanic languages (cognates: Old Frisian hopia, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, Dutch hopen; Middle High German hoffen “to hope,” which is borrowed from Low German). From early 13c. as “to wish for” (something), “desire.” Related: Hoped; hoping. To hope against hope (1610s) “hold to hope in the absence of any justification for hope” echoes Romans iv.18: Who against hope, beleeued in hope, that hee might become the father of many nations: according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seede bee. [King James Version, 1611] The Wycliffite Bible (c. 1384) has this as “Abraham agens hope bileuede that he schulde be maad fadir of manye folkis.” (from etymonline)

     So the idea of hope is fully rooted in theology. But even with pre-Philosophes, in the 13th Century, as the etymology tells us, the idea of hope took on a God-lessness by shapeshifting into ´desire´, from the Latin de sidere, from the stars: hope, as desire, is ¨await what the stars will bring.¨ (again, etymonline) But the stars don’t always bring good stuff. For that matter, God didn’t either, when he was still in business. Not much different, then, from Eliza´s ¨inexorable tides of Necessity.¨

     So you were right to ask, Danny, what are we to do? And why are we doing now what we´re doing, if it all seems so hopeless? The questions which led Bartleby to declare that he preferred not to, and led Gregor Samsa to decide one fine morning to simply stay in bed.

     But if we as yet prefer not to prefer not to, we need some kind of hope, somehow.

     Or we get up out of bed in the morning and just do things, as Nike of course would have us do. The pride of pre-revolutionary France, for example, was just doing things. People in the Age of Reason needed no reason, no grounds, to do what they did; they just did it. They were ungrounded.

     Bartleby and Samsa realized they, along with all around them, had been ungrounded, and on those grounds preferred not to. They were grounded; but hopelessly so. First step taken; will they take another, and another? 

     For that they need to find their hope, or their belief. When you guys had me stammering and stuttering about Nietzsche, I said something like ¨Nietzsche was searching for something new to believe.¨ Since belief and hope are almost the same things, maybe I could say it better: he was looking for something new to hope for. He knew the old (and present) hopes were dead hopes. ¨What?¨ he wrote somewhere, ¨two thousand years, and no new gods?¨ Within the first few pages of Zarathustra (Zarathustra is an alternative name for Zoroaster; Fedallah was Zorastrian), Nietzsche has Zarathustra list the various types who could be what he called ¨the bridge to the overman¨. One on the list: ¨I love the great scorners, because they are the great worshipers and arrows of yearning for the other shore.¨ Worshipers? Believers. Yearning? Hopeful desire. The other shore? The transcendental you asked me about, Kirk. Bartleby and Samsa were great scorners of this shore, but were missing the belief and hope for another shore.

     Sometimes, but not often, I do the right thing. Tonight I did the right thing by asking Dita to tell me what she thought hope is and means. ¨Hope,¨ she said, ¨means believing that things will get better.¨ Perfect in its simplicity. And perfectly expresses why Dita and I and you, Danny, depending on what rotation or Ixion’s wheel you find yourself, find it so hard to hope/believe: we don’t see things getting better. Speaking only for Dita and me: to the contrary, very, very much to the contrary.

     Which means, Brad, (I truly am sorry!)I just cannot believe in your revolution. That revolution, for me, is just that: yet another revolution of Ixion’s wheel. We end up where we started (if we’re lucky), then are doomed to do it all over again, and again and again. Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Likely too, Carlyle´s take on the French Revolution.

     But Dita didn’t leave it at that alone. She added: ¨The only hope I have is to do what I can to make things better for what’s around me.¨ What did you say Kirk? ¨Think local(ly).¨ Morning Joe this morning played a clip of a speech made by Robert Kennedy this day decades ago (and two years to the day before his own hopes were quashed by a bullet), in which Kennedy spoke about the need for us to hold on to our ¨tiny ripples of hope¨ which can merge with other ¨tiny ripples of hope¨ and become a great current of hope.

     Brad, speaking for myself but not for your dad, your uncle, or your uncle of another father and mother (who, they must admit, are my age, at least almost), I´m not yet too old for a tiny ripple of hope or two but am way too old for great currents of hope. But I do remember that, when we were young and in college, we, along with all our peers, lived by the motto: ¨Don´t trust (i.e., believe in or have hope for) anyone over thirty.¨ I reckon you´re over thirty, but still a lot closer to thirty than to sixty or seventy. Besides, surely forty is the new thirty anyway. Please proceed to trust your dad, your uncle, and your other-uncle; exceptions to every rule! I already know I don´t need to urge you not to trust me, or all the rest of us geezers.

     Instead of a minimum voting age, I think there should be a maximum voting age.

     Take my resistance to your revolution as an accidental endorsement of that revolution. And fricken just do it!