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Hope does not sit easily with me. Right now, my world is quieter than it’s been for months. A cat hath braved the dangerous topography of Christmas boxes to get to my lap and naps the nap of angels. This is when hope is easy. I hope this continues for ages or until my leg falls asleep.
Apart from moments like this, for me, no matter what Emily Dickinson says about feathers and all that, hope has really been the thing with claws. Or knives. I have to tell you the thing about me and Emily. So she writes: “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Big hit for her, everyone quotes it every chance they get.
Including me. Because. I. Completely. Missed. The. Point. It wasn’t your garden-variety case of dunciness. It was a variety of wilful dunciness. I forgot everything but the first verse. First verse:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all –
That seemed entirely true to me. Hope was obviously a sort of corbeau. I could see his talons piercing my soul as though the soul were flesh. And of course it would hiss at me like something from the underworld and truly never stop. Never stop.
And it never seemed at all necessary to go back and read the rest of the poem.
You should probably do that, though, lest you think of hope as carrion. It’s good stuff about the hopefulness of hope and how it’s always there for you, and things that sound like you and hope are exchanging wedding vows. But do read it.
The idea of hope not being a good thing is not original. One of my favourite origin stories of hope-as-bad-guy comes from the myth of its being one of the things in Pandora’s box. When the box was opened and all the terrible things came out – agents of chaos, hellions, bananas – only one thing stayed in. It was hope.
Some people say this helps us to survive war and famine and disease and bananas and all the world’s ills. Some other people say it’s a really good thing hope didn’t make it out because it was the greatest evil of all. Friedrich Nietzsche said – come now, stop, don’t be like that, I don’t throw nihilistic philosophers around every Sunday – he said, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
Now, I’m not saying he’s right. But I’m not not saying it, either.
And Emily Dickinson did not envisage a corbeau of the soul, but something more like a sparrow. Something beautiful that shores us up when the world brings us down. But it can be so very hard. It is easy, so very, very easy to throw around the word. People are forever hoping for things.
It may be ok to hope or to have hope, but I don’t know what it achieves in the workaday world, if it’s not wed to effort.
Consider butter. I do. A lot. So much so, I once made some. That was one of the greatest exercises in hope I ever undertook. This comes from my food-writing days. There are easy kitchen tips and even toys you can use to make butter. There used to be a ball you could fill with milk and have your kids throw it all over the place until the cream separated, but I can’t find it on Amazon any more.
But I was having nothing to do with any of that. For me, it had to be as close to making butter on a farm two centuries ago or nothing at all. So many things were against me. Like not knowing where real milk came from. Overestimating my fridge capacity. Forgetting that I live in the tropics.
But. But. I hoped so desperately that my experiment would work. I went though all the steps, made the best effort I could and then – don’t know from whence it came – but I just hoped. I had patience with the process. I accepted the limitations of my kitchen.
The butter worked out just fine, if about ten per cent of the amount I thought I was making. It was not what I hoped it would be, but I was ok. Making butter just for the hell of it is pretty low-stakes hope.
Hope is not bad. I’m just not good at it.
Wishing everyone a safe and sane new year.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.
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