No hope
Remember the rainbow souls from the last chapter? Here’s what happens to them after they land.
The fur is worry. One concern after another grows over the newborn soul, layer by layer, until the whole weight of the world sits on its shoulders. Somewhere underneath, its true colors are still glowing.
And the heaviest layer of fur is hope. Hope is how life gets put off. While you wait for more time, more money, more freedom, you miss what’s already here, and who you already are.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
— T. S. Eliot
The Weirdo “NO HOPE” Diagram, by R. Crumb. Scanned from Weirdo #3, Fall 1981, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies
R. Crumb drew the world as it appears — absurd, chaotic, going nowhere. No hope. And he’s not wrong about the picture. We appear in this world for a split second, never to experience it again. A few trips around the sun — poof, gone.
And yet joy is what you are born with. A fish at the bottom of the ocean isn’t bothered by any of it. The absurdity is real. The suffering is optional.
Joy is a choice — the choice to be free of your reactions. And that choice takes work.
Every religion promises salvation later — heaven, a better world after this one. To me they are all shards of one broken whole, each holding a piece of the truth. Put the puzzle together and the answer is short. Nobody is coming.
That’s the good news. We were let in here for a stroll of about seventy years, and this is the best of all worlds — the only one there is. There’s nothing else to do on Earth but live and help others live.
Zeus took revenge on people for the fire Prometheus had stolen for them. He gave Pandora a vessel and forbade her to open it. She opened it, and disease, trouble and old age flew out into the world. Pandora slammed the lid, and only hope was left inside. In Hesiod it was a jar; it became a box two thousand years later, through a translator’s mistake.
In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.
And that is exactly what’s worth keeping. Only it’s a different kind of hope — one that lives in the present.
When the waiting stops, the day opens up on its own. Once, in Thailand, I sat in a little apartment with the power out and had a great time — nothing can go wrong. Where hope for later used to live, light moves in.