'Hope, Indeed, Is Very Fallacious'

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see the oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have six vials of blood drawn. Cancer has consumed a larger portion of my consciousness since it killed my brother two years ago. 

On Thursday, I saw a new doctor, a young woman who worked hard to cheer me up, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly dispirited. In fact, her bubbly approach was annoying but I kept it to myself. Near the end she enthused, like a slightly demented cheerleader, “There’s always hope!” Tell that to my brother.

 

I’m of at least two minds when it comes to hope. On one side, there’s the famous list prepared by the great Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps,” after he survived seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. Here is number eighteen: “I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.”

 

Similarly, here is a portion of a 1984 interview the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert gave to two of his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in the wake of Jarugelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown and the rise of Solidarity:

 

Q: “What is the main reason why you write?”

 

A: “Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. ‘Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

 

Shalamov and Herbert survived Communism. You could say their experiences were too extreme, not typical of humanity’s lot. That’s one way to ignore human nature and its results in the twentieth century.

 

On the other hand, there’s Dr. Johnson, many years before the rise of totalitarianism, writing in the November 6, 1750, issue of The Rambler:

 

“Hope, is indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty.”

 

My MGUS remains stable: no cancer.