initial extract from The Road, Cormac McCarthy
I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
–
I was listening to a debate. They were talking about hope. Disagreeing. Trying to determine its value. Some believed in God, others claimed they didn’t. Some claimed that hope provides the present with purpose, others that purpose is moved to a distant, illusory future. Some meant that hope means courage, motivation and action, others that it invites a passive lifestyle and naive world view.
Obsolete or futuristic, the dispute continued in this manner, and one told the story of a Rabbi in the Auschwitz concentration camp. From the minor amount of margarine they got, he’d saved enough to create a candle to light for the Hanukkah ritual. They gathered; he presented the candle. He lit it, whereupon one of his brothers in faith exclaimed:
“We’re starving, how could you keep food from us?”
And so, the Rabbi answered:
“You can live three weeks without food. Three days without water. Three minutes without air. You cannot live even 3 seconds without hope.”
I thought, if this situation had been lived and hope is what we cling to when circumstances change, what makes us endure; how could anybody question its importance?
I kept on listening. And I heard, suddenly, that they were talking about the same concept, using different words. That’s the thing with language; it’s filtered through culture. It’s created by us but has our thinking enslaved. What the one group called hope, the other called optimism, credence, operability. The debate appeared swiftly useless, but I thought it necessary. If provided with a thorough definition of what they were talking, riding this dialogue to its end, they could cherish this indomitable attribute of humanity. If being humble, searching comprehension, reality could be made of potentialities; achievable if reached for.
Sometimes, you have to walk on the way for the way to appear,
a wise man once said.
Hope makes the reason to take that first step, I believe.
Be that the case, we should encourage that reason, should we not?