Hope. The light at the end of the tunnel. Lots of people think that hope is just another word, like what we've made love into. It's meaningless. All is meaningless. "Love" is just a word in the English language. In Greek there are six different words for love - they all mean different things. The different words are eros, philia, ludus, agape, pragma, and philautia. Love in our language is just a word.
Hope shouldn't be just a word. Hope is so much more. I'll begin by telling a story, because that is what I love to do. Stories can be more powerful than articles, which are what most blog posts are. This is different.
Disclaimer: I made these stories up to illustrate a point. Some of the following stories are based off of historical occurrences, and some stories may be based off of current events. Don't take them seriously. They are not facts. They are just ideas.
Story #1 - Based off the Graphic Novel MAUS (I and II)
Pain ends pain ends pain ends, the terrified woman thought to herself. It was the time that people would later refer to as World War II, and the young woman was trapped in a concentration camp called Auschwitz. The Auschwitz motto over the gate was "ARBIET MACHT FREI" or "work makes one free". It was a lie. Every day the woman lived in constant fear of everything that might happen to her. There was the fear that if she didn't stand right, then the Nazis would kill her, and there were many more fears like it. It was a horrible existence. She didn't know whether she would live or die. The only hope she held was of escaping the camp - that and the fact that her husband was in the other Auschwitz camp. He was waiting for the war to end. He had planned to get transferred to her camp as a worker, so they could see each other (Spiegelman 56)
It was love, but yet something about it made it seem like it was obligatory. That the love was to prove something to the world. It was beginning to feel fake. The woman didn't want it to be, but there was no mistaking it. This was a fear she carried with her, or at least she thought it was fear...
What she actually felt was anxiety. An overwhelming, crushing thing that wanted to destroy her. Anxiety is the worrying about something that is just a rumor or that may happen, but is not guaranteed. Fear in the Auschwitz camp is fear, because the Jews knew the consequences for doing something that the Nazis had "outlawed", but the fear of thinking that your husband doesn't truly love you is anxiety because it might not be true. You just worry that it is true (Godin 1).
As told in MAUS, Vladek Spiegelman and Anja, his wife, are struggling to keep a relationship and each other alive so that they can be together after the war. They seem to have such a great relationship, but it seems a bit overdone, and Anja doesn't accept all of the food that Vladek sneaks to her. Soon after they see each other for the first time since they were transferred to the concentration camps, Vladek is beaten because he spoke to Anja. This became a fear for him - that he would be beaten again or that Anja would get beaten but wouldn't survive (Spiegelman 56).
Story #2 - Based off The Lady or the Tiger
You stand in an arena, surrounded by the subjects of the kingdom. You stand charged of loving the daughter of the king. He has devised a test to figure out how to punish people who are charged of doing wrong. Behind you are two doors. One has behind it a lady, whom you will marry if you pick her door. The other has an enraged, starved tiger behind it. If you pick that door, then you will be dead in an instant. You stare up at the king and his daughter. The king is about to announce that you need to pick a door. Everyone knows the procedure, but the king wants to reiterate it just in case anyone happened to miss it, and also for formality. Your eyes turn toward your lover. You know that they know which door the lady and the tiger stand behind - they probably found out as soon as it was announced that you were to stand trial.
They point a finger, very casually and secretively, to the right. Not a trace of doubt clouds your vision as you turn and walk to the door on the right to open it. You know that your lover chose for both of you what was best, and even though you don't know what is behind the door, you know that your lover made the right decision. As you open the door, something shifts in the shadows...
But what was behind the door? Were you killed in an instant, or were you married? There is no storybook ending to this, where the lady behind the door is really the princess, who disguised herself and tied up the lady that was supposed to be there. And the tiger is not tamed. The doors and the rooms behind them are filled - that you know for sure. There is no chance of the tiger's room being empty, and there is no chance that neither of them are filled.
What did they choose? This question haunts your steps as you walk. Your lover just decided your fate. What did they choose? It echoes in your mind as your hand closes on the handle to the door on the right. It is agonizing to wait in suspense.
And what did you want them to choose? Death by the tiger so that you didn't have to marry the woman, or the woman so that you did not have to die?
In the story The Lady or the Tiger, this scenario is played out. There is fear on both sides - for both you and your lover. The princess is afraid for losing her would-have-been husband - whether it be by the marriage of you to another lady (whom the princess is jealous of and hates), or through death by tiger - and you are terrified that they made the decision that you didn't want. But first you have to figure out this: what did the man want, in the story? Death, or marriage and life?
There is hope that the princess chose life for you, and there is fear that they chose death. Everyone is afraid of death, until they are in a situation where they will inevitably die. Frank Richard Stockton says this in the story: Every heart stopped beating, every breath was held, every eye fixed immovably upon that man. Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and opened it (7).
Hope is powerful, and fear is powerful. Sometimes they seem like almost the same thing. You cannot have hope without fear. Fear controls you until you believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and there is a way out. Sometimes it seems like you have to sacrifice more to win that hope, but there are always sacrifices. As Kurt Vonnegut explains in All the King's Horses, "Necessity, like a child counting eeny, meeny miney, moe around a circle, pointed its finger at the one chessman who could be sacrificed. There was only one" (16).
Story #3 - from All the King's Horses by Kurt Vonnegut
In the story, an American Colonel is forced to play a game of chess against the Asian warlord Pi Ying - but his chess pieces are his own men, and when they are captured by the warlord, they are immediately killed. Soon there are only a few of the Colonel's men left, as well as his wife and twin boys. Suddenly the Colonel sees that the only way he can win the game and put Pi Ying in check is to offer a sacrifice to bait the warlord.
Colonel Kelly begins to think of the one person to be sacrificed as only x in a "mathematical proposition", and then sees the hope - he may get out alive, with everyone else, if he sacrifices that one person. He no longer feels fear of losing the one, but the hope of getting the rest of them out alive.
Margaret, the Colonel's wife, feels something entirely different. She is consumed by the fear of losing her sons, and so her actions, had she been in the place of Kelly, would have killed them all and left them no hope of escape. I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say here, but the two emotions are powerful. They can be hard to define, but fear and hope are two of the most powerful emotions in the world (in my opinion, the other three are faith, love and courage/bravery. Feel free to dispute the connection between the last two words, I am not going to go there).
Story #4 - based off of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Prisoners of war, trapped in Japan, face fears every day. The fear of being beaten. The fear of a psycho camp commander. All these fears raise anxiety to a point that is unbearable. Yet some POWs were able to stand and have courage in the face of death, danger, and fears.
In Unbroken, Mutsuhiro Watanabe (or "the Bird") terrifies all the prisoners with his unexpected outbursts. Suddenly they have fears that if they do something, the corporal will beat them or even kill them. This leads to anxiety about everything, which may be how some soldiers who fought in wars end up with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Those soldiers who have it are scarred and constantly wary.
During World War II, there was a Japanese corporal who was very abusive and would lash out for no reason at all against the Prisoners of War in his camp. One time, a man mentioned the word "gangway!" to clear his men out of the corporal's way, and was then beaten. Then Watanabe had a change of heart and apologized, but then changed his mind yet again. "After Bush went to bed, Watanabe returned and forced him to his knees. For three hours, Watanabe besieged Bush, kicking him and hacking off his hair with his sword. He left for two hours, then returned again. Bush expected to be murdered. Instead, Watanabe took him to his office, hugged him, and gave him beer and handfuls of candy and cigarettes. Through tears, he apologized and promised never to mistreat another POW. His resolution didn't last. Later that night, he picked up a kendo stick...and ran shrieking into a barracks, clubbing every man he saw" (Hillenbrand, 158).
Fear can control us, but hope can reach past it, even though hope isn't always a good thing (as illustrated in All the King's Horses). You can't have hope without fear, and you cannot have fear without hope for something better. When you have fear, you look for hope, but when you have hope, you do not look for fear. You are still hopeful and do not want to leave.
These emotions can be powerful, but hope and fear can be a choice as well. They can be instincts, or things that nag at the back of your mind, but they are still powerful.
-bookhouse4
Sources
- the Bible
- http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-ancient-greeks-6-words-for-love-and-why-knowing-them-can-change-your-life
- MAUS II (and I - I read both)
- All the King's Horses, by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Lady or the Tiger, by Frank Richard Stockton
- Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
- Fear and Anxiety by Seth Godin
