Having long reckoned with the relationship between cynicism and hope, I often say that cynics — who are the people most deserving of our pity — are just brokenhearted optimists. There is both a lovely confluence and a lovely inversion of these in the assertion that “hope is optimism with a broken heart,” which seems to me more like an aphoristic spear nobly thrown at our perpetual tangle of semantics in trying to differentiate between optimism and hope than a genuine and useful definition. But, of course, we each arrive at these notions so trapped in our own frames of reference, so saturated with our subjective experience, that no two portraits of a mental state or emotional orientation could ever possibly be precisely alike.

What is certain is that no matter what we call this openhearted yearning for betterment, pulsating beneath it is the infinite vulnerability of remaining unmet — all daring is forever haunted by the spectre of crushing disappointment, and there is nothing more daring than a reach from the real to the ideal.

And yet this yearning springs from our most fundamental nature. Living with it and living up to it is the highest homage we can pay, and must pay, to the unbidden gift of life.

With an eye to “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world,”