Hope

by  Richard Trainor

Hope is the human court of last resort.   It is an emotional place where we are exiled to when rational persuasion, canny manipulation, and outright force no longer work as methods for us to achieve what we want.   And when they don’t, and when we are absolutely convinced that they don’t after repeated unsuccessful applications thereof, then, if we are lucky, and haven’t been beaten into absolute submission, do we enter the land of hope.

For this is what hope truly is: it is a land, another country, and one not entirely our own—a dream-world bordered by desire on its frosty north, want on its dusky west, exigency on its cloudy east, and desperation in its sweltering south.   It is a province peopled almost exclusively by exiles who are sentenced there and who subsist on the balm that hope is said to provide them, or so rumor has it.

As a word that can be properly defined by dictionaries, hope is as amorphous as the borders I assigned to this land.   Merriam-Webster defines hope as both a transitive and intransitive verb.   As a transitive verb, hope means “to desire with expectation of obtainment”.   The Oxford English dictionary is a bit more definitive by declaring hope a noun and defining it thusly: “A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen”.

As you can see from the definitions above, hope is hardly the most concrete of definable realms.   Just the words used to define hope underline its apparent vagueness: “feeling”, “expectation”, “desire”.   There is nothing substantial about hope except for those who hold to it and cling to it with the desperation of finality.

For a song about hope, we have Donny Hathaway’s Someday We’ll All Be Free, a song whose perspective is from the end of the world but with the ameliorating prospect of hope.   Unfortunately hope didn’t save Donny Hathaway; in 1979, he died by pitching himself from a window on the 15th floor of The Essex Hotel in New York City.   For the literature choice we have Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, a novella whose lyrical description of desire for a well-lived life of service is absolutely transfiguring and imbued with hope of the purest order.

For film, the choice is easy.   It’s Shawshank Redemption hands down.   In this film, the protagonist has been visited by a storm of cyclonic proportions that has caused him to lose everything he had: his beautiful wife, his high-paying job as a banker, and his freedom.   As he describes his plight, “Bad luck, it’s gotta fall on somebody.   I was in the eye of the tornado.   I just didn’t expect the storm to last as long as it did.”   And he didn’t have any clue that such a storm awaited him, or that it was warranted.   “Whatever I did that was wrong, I think I paid for it and then some,” he says.

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I have a friend who fell into a similar black hole as the character of Andy Dufresne did in Shawshank Redemption, losing his family, his job, his friends, and his worldly goods.   A once-respected man with a good profession, this person was reduced to a laughing stock, insulted by his peers, scorned and laughed at by his friends and family.   He told me that in the end all he had left was hope, “and it wasn’t the hope that I’d get my family back, or my profession, or even my friends, although I didn’t want to lose any of them.   In the end, all that I hoped for was that the nightmare would finally be over, that it would end so I could begin again.”

As a letter read out loud near the end of Shawshank Redemption describes it: “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”   So says hope eternal flame-keeper Andy to his friend and recent parolee Ellis “Red” Redding.   Red was a once-cynical lifer who previously regarded hope as a dangerous thing.   Then he met Andy, a wrongfully convicted double murderer who had been subtracted from all that he had in life except hope.   Such folks are dangerous, as Red discovered; and as the prison warden at Shawshank discovered after Andy picked him clean of $350,000 and left him facing criminal indictments, including murder, while Andy escaped to Mexico.

And so, as people like Andy Dufresne and his prison reclamation project Red Redding illustrate, perhaps we are wrong to think of hope as the human court of last resort for the beaten down and downtrodden.   Perhaps hope is the province reserved only for the most hardy and skillful of survivors.   In order to reach this storied land, perhaps we have to lose all that we had and, in so doing, are only then admitted inside the holy borders of the land of hope.   And only then do we realize that the entire world is now ours again, bordered only by the breadth of our imagination, and that the Land of Hope is just as rock-solid and real a place as Missoula, Montana, or Prescott, Arizona, or Asheville, North Carolina.

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