But Pandora lifted the jar’s heavy lid with her hands,
Scattering those baneful afflictions, inflicting them on humankind.
Only Hope, there in its impregnable home,
Remained within, under the lid of the jar,
And did not fly out.
~ Hesiod, Works and Days
PHILOCTETES:
All right, then,
let me salute this land as I depart.
Farewell, you cave that shared my vigil,
and farewell, you nymphs of streams and meadows,
you pounding headlands beaten by the sea,
where in the inner spaces of my den
the blasts from South Wind often soaked my head,
where Mount Hermaea often echoed
the cries I screamed out in my storms of pain.
But now, you Lycian streams and waters,
I am leaving you, going away at last,
beyond all hopes I ever entertained.
~ Sophocles, Philoctetes (I. Johnston, tr.)
I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:so bitter — death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw.
~ Dante, Inferno (A. Mandlebaum, tr.)
Soon Orpheus was retracing his steps without incident
And Eurydice, restored to him, was approaching the upper world,
Walking unseen behind him (Proserpina had laid down this condition),
When suddenly some madness overcame him, no longer on his guard,
Which would be pardonable, if the dead were capable of pardoning:
He stopped, and though his Eurydice was all but in the light of day,
Not thinking, alas, irrationally, he looked back.
Vergil, Georgics
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
~ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, tr.)
“You can’t eat hope,” the woman said.
“You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,” said the colonel.
~ Gabriel García Márquez, “No One Writes to the Colonel” (J. Bernstein, tr.)
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
~ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I have not told you half that happened when I was young. I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.
~ Plenty Coups, Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened- Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.
~ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, “The Dead”
And yet, what was that? A ripple of hope went through me like a faint breeze over a lake. What was this sign that had awakened my instinct before knocking on the door of my consciousness? . . . I swear to you that something is about to happen. I swear that life has sprung in this desert. I swear that this emptiness, this stillness, has suddenly become more stirring than a tumult on a public square.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (L. Galantière, tr.)
In my theory of the implicate order, the whole generates the particulars, rather than saying that the particulars are collected to make the whole. We must be aware, however, that our concept of the whole is always going to be limited, so when we are thinking about what the implicate order is, we need to open up our ideas about it and consider it as a particular again. So we need a two-way movement between the general and the particular.
~ David Bohm, “Wholeness, Timelessness and Unfolding Meaning”
But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.
~ Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
~ Cormac McCarthy, The Road
EDGAR
Give me your hand. You are now within a foot
Of th’ extreme verge. For all beneath the moon
Would I not leap upright.
GLOUCESTER Let go my hand.
Here, friend, ’s another purse; in it a jewel
Well worth a poor man’s taking. Fairies and gods
Prosper it with thee. He gives Edgar a purse.
Go thou further off.
Bid me farewell, and let me hear thee going.
EDGAR, walking away
Now fare you well, good sir.
GLOUCESTER With all my heart.
EDGAR, aside
Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it.
~ Shakespeare, King Lear