Despair?

Despair is the emptiest of feasts. It is one which most of us have tasted; some of us have tried every dish on its malignant buffet. Some of its offerings include despondency, gloom and depression in all their various flavours. The word itself is, like 'desperation', descriptive of hopelessness and bears that meaning.

Twenty-five years ago, I cut a deal with despair. The documentation of that deal was based on the terrifying and logical contract first conceived in poetic form by that greatest of poetical Jesuits, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His 1918 poem, 'Carrion Comfort' is reproduced below. It is my fond hope that my friends who grapple with that Giant, Despair, will take comfort of a true kind from the reading of this poem.

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

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Dum spiro, spero, say the old texts. While there's life, there's hope is the equivalent in English. Always. For Hope was the last of the things to fly out of Pandora's Box. Some say it was the most final of evils, but I prefer not to embrace such pessimism.