Hope Is the Glory of "Maybe"

What is real and in your arms is no match for what you imagine.

Gatsby: right problem, wrong answer.

Hope, as they say, floats. We carry it weightless within, and in that way it carries us too. Hope takes us toward something we want, can take us right up to the thing, but it has to leave us short of the goal—because hope doesn’t deal in having.

Hope is fuel to get you there, nothing more, and it pushes us forward by encouraging us to believe perfection might be out there instead of reality, which is corporeal and therefore finite and lesser. Hope is the glory of maybe. Possession—reality—is the end of that. When you possess what you desired, you are confronted with the difference between what is and what could be. If your mind is going to romp again like the mind of God, as Fitzgerald put it, you’re going to have to start again, maybe on the last wish one more time, maybe on another.

And that’s what you’ll do.

We are bound to look forward; our minds are the captive of our biology. We are suckers for the twinkling perfection in a star too far away to touch. And we’ll run toward it, and that is what will take us to tomorrow. But the transaction won’t do any of what we imagine. Tricked again. It doesn’t take many of these letdowns to make us cynical toward the idea that there is meaning to any of this.

But I say there is a way to be satisfied.

-- From Taming the Molecule of More, "Finale: The Sound of a Tuning Fork, Struck Upon a Star"