This reply from Colson Whitehead to the question "What do you hope to see in 2025" has been a sentiment building in my own heart and mind the last months of 2024. Peter and I had a conversation the other night about what things we thought were true when we first met (2016) that we no longer believe: I no longer believe the arc of history bends toward justice on its own, and I no longer believe this country's and the world's institutions serve the common good.
These realizations lend themselves to a grim outlook; and they unfortunately are being proved out as truer and truer with each passing day. Within this worldview, I have been struggling to find a guiding light. I have been struggling with how to stay present, sensitive, and curious while beholding harsh reality.
But at the same time, on a personal/individual level, I have never been more surrounded by love and joy and creativity and invention: I am intensely grateful every day, I admire the work of many people around me and beyond, I truly love and delight in Peter, our friends, our family. These feelings of personal satisfaction have felt like a spiritual schism, because I unthinkingly was subscribed to there being only two ways of being in the world:
being aware of the world, and therefore becoming cynical and pessimistic
sticking my head in the sand, and therefore becoming self-interested yet blindly optimistic
Between the two, it felt important to remain aware, even if it came at the expense of seeing a positive future.
Yet, this was a simplistic and uninspected false dichotomy I was unknowingly living by: and I've been slowly realizing that the alternative way forward is via hope. The decision to practice a spiritual position of hope was asserted, celebrated, even demanded by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his new book, The Spirit of Hope.
This book was on my Christmas wish-list, not because I was particularly interested in the topic nor out of familiarity with Han's work, but rather because I wanted to acquaint myself more with Anselm Kiefer, who was recently the subject of a Wim Wenders documentary called Anselm. The art pieces inserted between the pages are haunting and complex (see image at top), but Han's writing turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.
This book provides the spiritual action I had been mulling:
To hope means to be intenselyprepared for what is to come. Hope increases our sensibility for what-is-not-yet, on which we have no direct influence.
There is nothing comforting happening at the moment: we're in an age of unrelenting assaults on the human spirit, underway via interconnected environmental, genocidal, technological, economic, political factors. But we can't look away, and at the same time, we need to fiercely protect and defend our happiness, dignity, and humanity. Han contends this is possible via hope, which is both an active thought and a form of preparedness.
He distinguishes hope from optimism or pessimism (hence sidestepping my simplistic false dichotomy above), as the latter are two moods that one rests in passively, assuming whichever positive/negative future that mood projects. He claims there isn't an active component to being optimistic or pessimistic, as they are both ways of renouncing responsibility for whatever the fore-ordained future holds.
Hope is a new thing to me, because as Han points out, it cannot coexist with fear. I personally have lived much of my life ruled by fear, and upon escaping it, moved into being governed by anxiety (a generalized fear without object). And I became a little lost at what my motivation had become. This book feels like a lucid, compelling call to action for a new organizing principle of my everyday:
In hope, one places one's trust in what exceeds the self.
This book would dismiss the rationale of "prepare for the worst, hope for the best": Han proposes that by hoping, one enters an attitude or mood of preparedness, fully facing and assessing reality, in order to act toward that hope.
Those who hope, love or believe devote themselves to the other; they transcend the immanence of the self.
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Discourse on Happiness, Emilie Du Châtelet
With hope instilled, I read another essay this week that was lucid, compelling, uplifting, and further protection against despair: Emilie Du Châtelet, Discourse on Happiness (1730s-1748).
Much of what she says I can happily say I've thought about and feel I live by, and it's satisfying to see these things laid out so jauntily. Though there was one axiom I found curious, and something I hadn't considered before:
I say that to be happy one must be susceptible to illusion.
As she elaborates, she explains that preserving illusion means practicing imagination by delighting and escaping into entertainment. I don't think I would have ever detailed entertainment and imagination as essential to my happiness, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I live this one out potentially the most, and the most unthinkingly, in my life. As things get ever more serious and scary and dark, this axiom feels more important than ever to practice and proclaim.
Distilled in a concluding maxim, may these words guide us into 2025 and beyond:
So let us try to be healthy, to have no prejudices, to have passions, to make them serve our happiness, to replace our passions with inclinations, to cherish our illusions, to be virtuous, never to repent, to keep away sad ideas, and never to allow our heart to sustain a spark of inclination for someone whose inclination for us diminishes and who ceases to love us. We must leave love behind one day, if we do indeed age, and that day must be the one when love ceases to make us happy. Lastly, let us think of fostering a taste for study, a taste which makes our happiness depend only on ourselves. Let us preserve ourselves from ambition, and, above all, let us be certain of what we want to be; let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.
