Hope

When I posted the first recording of HOPE it was May 3, 2020: the next day the restrictions, after two interminable months, would finally be loosened. I wrote, «We will not go back to normal, but it is something… HOPE is the key word now, intended, however, as a dynamic process that emerges from the ruins and actively projects itself into the future, not expectation then but trustful action». It still took a long time, in fact, to go back to normal, and frankly today I wonder whether it makes sense to use this expression, which, after all, implies the idea of the pandemic as an expulsion from Eden, the breakdown of an initial state of substantial well-being, or more trivially the usual cliché of we were better off before. The immense tragedy of disease and death has not made our lives worse than it has revealed weaknesses and miseries already there. Nor, unfortunately, has it made us all that much better, as was repeatedly hoped for then: indeed, it is quite evident, today more than ever with a war that exploded a year ago in the heart of Europe, the inability to direct our destiny toward “the prodigy of life in peace, of life tuned to a lost harmony whose distant echo can comfort our hearts” (M. Zambrano). But a breach has opened, and a faint light has begun to illuminate areas once in shadow revealing the vast field of unrealized potential. This is not the confident waiting of a favorable event, a passive standing by, but confident action towards a goal: HOPE.