Hope

I've been reading Stephen Jay Gould's last book, "The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities".

One passage in particular really struck me:
"We live in a vale of tears, and bad things often happen to good people. These unpleasant facts about life cannot be avoided. Therefore, and especially, we need to sustain a realm of human goodness, and a calm place of optimism based on value and meaning, amid realities that we yearn to avoid but cannot deny."

It's a passage describing the need for poetry, a need to laugh and persist even though we know the facts.

I remember reading "The Consolation of Philosophy" in college, a text written by Boethius, a prisoner ultimately put to death, and really thinking hard about the condemnation of hope. It's true that the person who hopes can be disillusioned, and Philosophy's advice to Boethius was against hope; what you don't hope for you won't be disappointed to loose.

I guess it's ultimately a question of what you hope for - maybe hope is best in moderation, as cautious optimism, informed by the facts but not contained by them.