There is a story #VaclavHavel has told about falling into a sewer two months before he became president of his country. "What was striking about the sewer experience was how hope had emerged from hopelessness, from absurdity.
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I've always been (..) affected by the theater of the absurd because it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning — in other words, having lost the ground under his feet.
But history is not something that takes place elsewhere; it takes place here. We all contribute to making it. If bringing back some human dimension to the world depends on anything, it depends on how we acquit ourselves in the here and now.
The kind of hope I often think about (..) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't. Hope is (..) an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can't delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope... that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things,
In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.
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