Hope and History

In his Preface to Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas, Lawrence Weschler quotes from Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Cure of Troy:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can ride up
And hope and history rhyme.”

My reaction to those lines is excitement quashed at once by the memory of human nature. Heaney’s “Sophoclean rhapsody”, Weschler tells us, was composed in 1990, the same year as Calamities of Exile, “in the aftermath of that annum mirabilis, 1989, when everything seemed so much simpler and dictatorships everywhere seemed to be melting away. But then the floodtide passed over and things fell decidedly out of rhyme once again. Totalitarianism, though manifestly evil, turned out to be evil in a confoundingly complicated way, one that seemed to contaminate everything it touched – not least, all opposition to it.”

Weschler’s words are eerily prescient. Remember the euphoria of late 1989 (as opposed to Tiananmen Square, six months earlier)? Seldom has news so exhilarated me or given me reason to feel so hopeful. More than 70 years of orchestrated horror was ended. I remember thinking, with those superstitious cells even rationalists carry around in their brains, that if the news out of Russia and Eastern Europe was true, best not think about it – the dreamer might suddenly waken. No, the dreamer still sleeps, but you remember what Stephen Daedalus said about history.

On Dec. 10, 1989, Murray Kempton published a column in New York Newsday headlined “As the World Turns” that echoes the reversals and ironies of Weschler’s sentences above:

“Communism has been driven to yield over its Eastern European garrisons to an unknowable future not by force of arms but by the collapse of its will for further struggle under the weight of all the history that had piled up before it seized what it had felt assured would be its time. If there is such a thing as an inevitability in history, it is that those who think they can ordain what will henceforth be always end up finding themselves over come by what has ever been.”