Hope(lessness)

A Wendell Berry poem that challenges me deeply

The poem that has probably challenged me more over the past several years than anything else I've read is an untitled one by Wendell Berry:

Yes, though hope is our duty

let us live a while without it

to show ourselves we can.

Let us see that, without hope,

we still are well. Let hopelessness

shrink us to our proper size.

Without it we are half as large

as yesterday, and the world

is twice as large. My small

place grows immense as I walk

upon it without hope.

Our springtime rue anemones

as I walk among them, hoping

not even to live, are beautiful

as Eden, and I their kinsman

am immortal in their moment.

Out of charity let us pray

for the great ones of politics

and war, the intellectuals,

scientists, and advisors,

the golden industrialists,

the CEO’s, that they too

may wake to a day without hope

that in their smallness they

may know the greatness of the Earth

and Heaven by which they so far

live, that they may see

themselves in their enemies,

and from their great wants fallen

know the small immortal

joys of beasts and birds.

Leavings, Wendell Berry

There is a certain irony in the fact that Berry has also written about the necessity of hope, but here he pushes against (maybe?) a “thin” understanding of it as a mostly individualistic effort. I sense something deeply meaningful and powerful in Berry's suggestion that we “live a while without” hope, but it also feels a bit like practicing starvation… ohhh, maybe that's it! (I literally just thought of that as I was writing this). Perhaps he is suggesting a kind of “fasting,” a temporary release from the way I sometimes greedily grasp for any straw of hope for a better world, a more peaceful inner world, a sense that what we do and how we live makes a difference in some larger way. What, in this light, is our own personal legacy in the face of “the small immortal joys of beasts and birds?” What is our hope for a “better world” (about which he speaks in another poem) unless it is in a cessation of that grasping, grasping, grasping after the world that maybe I share with the “golden industrialists… and CEOs?”

My favorite line is “Let hopelessness shrink us to our proper size.” Humility, then, is at the heart of his perspective; that which reminds us that we are of the world, rather than somehow apart from or above it. How is it that our insistence on hope might enlarge us beyond our “proper size?” And how might our “small places… grow more immense” upon our willingness to reconsider what hope looks like for us and for “Earth and Heaven?”

Peace, Dana