Hope: A Fable

A thanks for listening, and comment on the writing of Hope: A Fable.

“Look,” I said and pointed to my left. The sun was swollen. It sat atop the highest mountain visible to us, and it was drawing all the colors of the desert into the west. We watched, one sunset for three people. I Works: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I read once about a pilot who loved the desert. Flying over it at night, looking up from his cockpit, he saw meteors streaking across a moonless sky, like fiery sparks swept along in a gust of wind. Works: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping Herman Melville, Moby Dick

He did write at least one lengthy letter, however. He composed it on the night before he was to set out on his return trip. Works: Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer Virginia Garland, “Light and Shadow in the Park,” in Arthur Adelbert Taylor, California Redwood Park Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring Virgil, Georgics

“I loved your grandmother, and she loved me. Still, I think you know how unlike we were. When I was a girl, I didn’t want anything to do with books. History bored me. The two of you shared that, and I’m glad." Works: Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer Virginia Garland, “Light and Shadow in the Park,” in Arthur Adelbert Taylor, California Redwood Park Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring Virgil, Georgics

Fall gave way to winter. On that Sunday morning before Christmas, I rose before dawn to creep out of the house and make for the river. Works: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince James Joyce, “The Dead” James Dickey, Deliverance

I ran away from home when I was twelve. Works: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince James Joyce, “The Dead” James Dickey, Deliverance

Andrea was the name of the veteran who lived under the bridge. She spoke in a whisper, never looking in my direction. Sentences came to me broken into bits, in shards of thought that I had to gather up and fit together. Works: Descent of Inanna Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” Gilgamesh Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character Brooke King, War Flower: My Life After Iraq

I remember the gleam of cold starlight on black iron. Ahead lay two ribbons of steel curving into a jagged wall of trees. The train passed through one moonlit town after another, with their houses of weary clapboard and weed-choked yards. Works: Frank R. Linderman, Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus Edmond Jabès, “Drawn Curtains”

With me in the hospital burn unit was an inmate from a nearby prison. There had been a riot. A control system had failed. Or a guard had been bribed. Nobody was entirely sure. Works: Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, translation by Constance Garnett Hesiod, Works and Days

Before the voyage and wreck of the Calypso, I spent some time fighting wildfires. One morning I found myself in a smoke-shadowed forest at the head of a little valley. I had lost my way. Works: Dante, Inferno, translation by Allan Mandelbaum Virgil, Aeneid Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” translation by Justin O’Brien Book of Job, New Revised Standard Version Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

This happened years after my nighttime adventure through field and forest. In all that time, I hadn’t lost what it gave me. It had lodged an ember in my chest, a living coal in a world of gray, which glowed with silent knowledge of an unsolved secret. Works: Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” Heart of Darkness Sophocles, Philoctetes Homer, Odyssey Heraclitus, Fragments William Faulkner, “The Bear” Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

I have a story to tell you that belongs to that instant between sleep and waking, that leaden-limb, dream-tattered moment.

In an era of climate change, pandemic, and political dysfunction, it’s reasonable to wonder what hope can look like, where it can be found, and what can be done when the prospect of disappointed hope seems to be too painful to bear. The problem is to how to get at it, how to get at the nature and possibilities of hope. In this podcast, I try to do so by turning to what humans have been doing from the time we first acquired language: storytelling. I want to tell some stories, some fables if you will, about hope. Each of them will center on a different metaphor for hope and despair, because after all, that’s what stories are at their heart: an effort to understand one thing by relating it to something else.