Hope Springs Eternal

Stuck like a dope with a thing called hope

This week I have mostly been walking, eating, drinking, talking, reading, doing jigsaws, sleeping, watching TV, Zooming…. You know how it goes. But we’ve made a return to Bolton Abbey for walks and picnics so that’s good. Ensign Nellie Forbush (knucklehead Nellie) sings insistently in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific:

When the sky is a bright canary yellow

I forget every cloud I've ever seen,

So they called me a cockeyed optimist

Immature and incurably green

I have heard people rant and rave and bellow

That we're done and we might as well be dead,

But I'm only a cockeyed optimist

And I can't get it into my head

I can be infuriatingly like Nellie. There will be a silver lining. The glass is half full. I do believe in fairies.

Hope Springs

I know from NHS workers that the past year has seen spirits lurch from shock to despair to elation to exhaustion to despondency to trauma to grief to relief to fortitude to numbness…. But the Covid crisis has also exposed wells of resilience and blankets of compassion. In his An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope urges us not to look to God for answers:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of Mankind is Man….

….Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much:

Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;

Still by himself, abus'd, or disabus'd;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all….

And yet…. And yet….

Hope springs eternal in the human breast

Man never is, but always to be, blest.

Time (and the vaccine programme) marches on. There are reasons to be hopeful. The detritus of the pandemic (including the lessons we could learn) will inevitably and ineffably flow under the bridge. And Spring will come again. Hope will spring eternal.

Water under the bridge....