Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 15

It is difficult, yea impossible, to exaggerate the power of hope in the scheme of things.

Think of two giant magnets. One is gravity, beneath us, pulling all things down. The other is hope, before us, drawing all things forward. We cannot stop hope any more than we can stop photosynthesis. That strong-as-gravity magnetic power lures all living things into the future.

Look around. See it in the plant kingdom, as the little acorn’s genetic endowment guides it on its way to becoming a majestic oak. See it in March daffodils yellowing the hillside. See it this summer in weeds that thrive in the uncultivated garden. “The violets in the mountains,” Tennessee Williams wrote, “break the rocks.”

See it in the animal kingdom, in the two-inch-long loggerhead turtle that from the day of its birth on the shores of South Carolina navigates by the earth’s magnetic field on an odyssey of eight thousand miles around the Sargasso Sea and back to South Carolina to fulfill the role nature assigned it.

This stupendous force that moves plants and animals forward looks and smells and sounds a lot like what we human animals, when we experience it in ourselves and others, call hope. See it in the sweat of the cardiac rehab patient on the treadmill, in the premature infant exiting the womb squalling and kicking, and in emaciated Sudanese teenagers crossing a desert in search of food.

Rogers Hornsby, one of the best hitters ever in baseball, second only to Ty Cobb, said in an interview: “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

Hope is what the prospect of spring is for inveterate baseball players or fans in winter—it keeps them going.