Speaking about Hesiod’s defamation of Pandora to a friend yesterday, I made the suggestion that Hesiod would have been better off if he gave up the “hope” of attracting a woman so much younger than he and tried, himself, to grow up enough to attract a woman his own age.

As funny (awful) as such misogyny and its solutions can be (Hesiod’s story of Pandora in Works and Days being his solution to the woman “crisis”), there is something there that had me thinking about it all night. I do rather think that hope is a problem for human kind. I know there is all that rhetoric about how hope keeps us going along when things are awful, but I suspect that such a sentiment is tripe. And not the edible kind.

It’s not that hope got hung up on the lip of that (alabaster) jar that is the problem – that Hope didn’t fly out into the wide world like her miserable siblings – the problem is more that we hang onto hope like it is something fragrant that one might find clinging to the lip of an alabastron, when in fact it is often the reason we don’t face up to how things really are. When in hope of a just resurrection one tolerates the humiliation of being used and discarded – as an example.

Then this wonderful thing happened this morning.

I was on twitter and @harvestbird posted a link taking me to Letters of Note. Ooooooh.

So I’m reading and I come across this paragraph:

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

Heh! for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs… and with Hope’s her flightless wings nowhere in sight.

We can call it what we choose I suppose, but really we keep on going because we are animals, and that is what animals, on the whole, do. But if we gave up our rhetoric of how the future will be better and ignore the bad shit happening, then maybe we’d actually have a chance to attend to the bad shit and do something about it. Sort of like Hesiod…maybe if he’d actually looked when preening, he’d have left the poor girl alone and he’d have been able to write a more truthful version of Pandora’s emergence.