Hope

 Hope

I had been listening, for four days, to my companions talking high-speed Spanish. Though I have been studying it for 12 years now I find it difficult to keep up. Every now and then someone drops a word that I am confident of, like 'estudiantes' or 'medicinas', and I am tempted to offer a contribution of my own to the conversation. After all, I taught students for 30 year, and in a medical school. But while struggling to form a sentence, it became clear that the subject of their conversation had moved on. It occasionally worried me that they might come to think of me as a dull person, but shrugged that off, when I realised that their opinions did not actually affect my capacity, in any way.

On the morning of the fifth day, I was up and dressed before breakfast and I listened to the tail-end of a podcast I had started a few days previously; it was "The President's Inbox" of 9th September 2026, in which James M. Lindsay (host) and Walter Russell Mead (guest) discussed "What the US Got Wrong in the War on Terrorism". Towards the end one or other quoted Solzhenitsyn effectively saying that we all contain good and bad elements, and bemoaning the Black verus White mentality of modern politics, which makes collaboration and compromise very difficult.  Then James Lindsay turned to Walter Mead and asked him to sum up by looking ahead: "What lessons would you hope that (political) candidates...would take away from September 11th. ..". And then followed the most inspiring political concept I had encountered in years. Walter Mead replied:

"Okay. Well, I would say, number one is the importance of preventing bad things before they happen. Think about if the Israelis had prevented the October 7 attacks, if we had prevented 9/11, or if we had deterred Putin's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 –– how much better off we would be?". I was thrilled.

So, when we sat round the breakfast table for our last communal meal before dispersing, I took a gap in the conversation to lay out, speaking (I suspect) in English, this far-reaching question., As I contemplated the heavenly possibilities that open before me I was near moved to tears and had trouble controlling my voice. 

A short, discomfited silence followed, then Marie Thérèse said: 

"Yes, but the world is what it is" , which I felt as a devastating 'knock-down' (**) response, but one met, I like to think, by my equally 'knock-down' riposte:

"Indeed, but the world is not what it is becoming", to which she kindly assented. 

(** 'knock-down' in the sense in which the term was introduced by Humpty Dumpty, in "Through the Looking glass", Lewis Carroll, 1872.)