Before the voyage and wreck of the Calypso, I spent some time fighting wildfires. One morning I found myself in a smoke-shadowed forest at the head of a little valley. I had lost my way.

Works:

Dante, Inferno, translation by Allan Mandelbaum

Virgil, Aeneid

Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” translation by Justin O’Brien

Book of Job, New Revised Standard Version

Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

This happened years after my nighttime adventure through field and forest. In all that time, I hadn’t lost what it gave me. It had lodged an ember in my chest, a living coal in a world of gray, which glowed with silent knowledge of an unsolved secret.

Works:

Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” Heart of Darkness

Sophocles, Philoctetes

Homer, Odyssey

Heraclitus, Fragments

William Faulkner, “The Bear”

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy

I have a story to tell you that belongs to that instant between sleep and waking, that leaden-limb, dream-tattered moment.

In an era of climate change, pandemic, and political dysfunction, it’s reasonable to wonder what hope can look like, where it can be found, and what can be done when the prospect of disappointed hope seems to be too painful to bear. The problem is to how to get at it, how to get at the nature and possibilities of hope. In this podcast, I try to do so by turning to what humans have been doing from the time we first acquired language: storytelling. I want to tell some stories, some fables if you will, about hope. Each of them will center on a different metaphor for hope and despair, because after all, that’s what stories are at their heart: an effort to understand one thing by relating it to something else.