You stillness, you tenderness, you who have no place except within us, somewhere in the chambers behind our countenances. You, invisible and remote from all senses. You, who have the power to be more real in an individual than any universally known fact. You, who shelters the truly deepest desires for which circumstances and time grant no other abode. You make us greater and more beautiful, and those who do not have you are gray and stuck a little too deeply in the resistance of matter and think that the earth is more real than the sky.
Hope, you independent one. You who are closest to fantasy and joy. You have the power to make things shine—yes—you do not shine, you arouse light in those who carry you within themselves. And you give strength for considering possible what no one else experiences as possible, so that what is unformed and non-existent can be borne.
Who can take you away? Bad things that happen and keep heading in the same direction. Or the tendency to dismiss you as illusory. But nothing takes you away forever—you are always ready to emerge among those who want to be with you. You, who love life and peace. You, human being. You, hope, have no guiding handrail like faith. You can only shine out into the open from a person’s own strength, without form, without image. As if you were a question that one sets out to find a clear answer to, without being able to grasp anything about it.
Doesn’t your own will speak deeply within you, knowing that it can do nothing for itself except consider that what is unreal now is possible in the future? Doesn’t the will create a place for itself within you that protects it from despair, fear, and restlessness, without deceiving itself that what it wants is not there? “What you can still hope for is still being born.”1
Is hope just imagination? No, because it is not filled with images. Is it just a private wish? No, because although it is connected to me, it stretches me into a great expanse that transcends me. Don’t the hopeless have it right, in light of their experience? Yes, but no future comes from experience.
Hope, you empty, noble one, you who dies last, I live with you.
Translation Laura Liska
Illustration Gilda Bartel
