Hope

So we must define more accurately what it is to hope. In ordinary speech we often call something hope that is not hope at all but a wish, a longing, a longing expectation now of one thing, now of another, in short, an expectant person’s relationship to the possibility of multiplicity. When hope is understood in that way (when hope actually means only expectation), it is easy enough for the youth and the child to hope, because the youth and the child themselves are still a possibility. On the other hand, it is quite in order when one sees how possibility and hope, or the sense for the possible, usually decline in people over the years. This in turn explains why experience speaks deprecatingly about hope, as if it were merely something for youthfulness (which the child’s and the youth’s hope certainly is also), as if hoping, like dancing, were a youthful something for which older people have neither the liking nor the lightness. Well, yes, to hope is indeed to make oneself light with…