A Hope Once Offered by Michael Carson

The final horror unleashed from Pandora's Box is both a feeling of possibility, which cures us of the burden of reality's factual failings, and a curse that dampens our appreciation for what is true. In other words, to hope for a better future is implicitly and simultaneously to perform a negation of the present.

A hope, once offered, will lodge itself into the consciousness like a splinter, impossible to forget, impossible to escape. The dark contrast it draws and the shadow it casts across our present is just as illusory as the hope itself. It pulls at us with hypnotic desire, which lies at the root of suffering, and yet without it, all despair would be infinite, and there would be no escape at all from the facts of our now. And so, we live in a sort of limbo, caught between an unrealized future and an unwanted present.