Like everyone else, I use the word hope without much knowing what it means. So it's good to be reminded by Václav Havel’s idea that hope is:
. . . a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation . . . It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart: it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don’t think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favourable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are . . . It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
(Quoted from page 4 of The Redress of Poetry, by Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.)
For a brief biography of Václav Havel, click here. For images of or relating Václav Havel, click here.
For a brief biography of Seamus Heaney, click here. For images of or relating Seamus Heaney, click here.
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