Where are we to turn for lucid hope, then, in cultural moments that inflame despair, which so easily metastasizes into cynicism? That is what the inimitable Zadie Smith explores in a piece titled “On Optimism and Despair,” originally delivered as an award acceptance speech and later adapted for her altogether fantastic essay collection Feel Free ( public library). I have long believed that critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté. We forget that the present always looks different from the inside than it does from the outside - something James Baldwin knew when, in considering why Shakespeare endures, he observed: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it - no time can be easy if one is living through it.” We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins - it never will - but that it doesn’t die.”Ĭaught in the maelstrom of the moment, we forget this cyclical nature of history - history being merely the rosary of moments the future strings of its pasts. “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII.
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