“Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell.”

 

…till deep night fell.

I know those words. I know that world.

Another friend is sick, not with a cold. How many more loved ones will face this? How many deaths must we endure? My questions rung out into the evening sky, till deep night fell.

Another marriage is ending, no solace to be found. The pain of families torn asunder wails in wordless tones, sirens barreling down a busy street… like sirens going to the next crime, the next riot, the next war… sirens echoing from every building, till deep night fell.

It’s Boko Haram, and the thousands of cries of now childless mothers. It’s Charlie Hebdo, with a hundred other crimes of religious violence. It’s PEGIDA, and the tens of thousands of ways we try to control or destroy those who are “Other.”

It’s enough, quite frankly, to break your heart, if you really think about it. I suppose that’s why most of us don’t. We ignore. We numb. We get caught up in Sports, Style, or Selfies. We escape this world, but never really. The world has a pretty dang good hold on us, it will get its recognition eventually.

—

What do we do then?

Despair. Yes, that’s an option. It has a lot of merit too. But after all is said and done, is there another option?

Hope. Yes, the opposite of despair. A word of either incredibly fluff or the most solid of substance. A word that remains, for me, both known and elusive. For what often hold as hope is a lesser version, a shadow of the greater thing.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I know those words. I know that rage. But to name it hope is a false step indeed. There is a stubbornness to hope, but it is not it’s equal. That’s not hope; it’s defiance.

Defiance. The power of the will, the decision to not give in. If I just hold out long enough, search hard enough, and work diligently enough, it will get better and it will be better. It burns like fire in the pit of your stomach, fueling the fight against despair.

Let there, however, be no confusion. Defiance is not hope, for defiance draws power from within and from self. Hope is much more dangerous, a seemingly instable reliance on something Other, something outside of us. It is a word that rewrites not just one person’s story, but the entire world around them. It is a movement that began long before us and will continue without us, if necessary.

Hope is other-worldly, but not in the sense that Nietzsche meant. It is not an escape from the world, but an understanding that there is a world that exists, and it has movement bigger than any single moment or event.

Chances are it looks a lot more like a ray of starlight that comes after deep night has fallen than a rage of a fiery sunset.

“Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. … [he] saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”

Still Wandering,

Tony