Pandora opened the jar and every evil flew out, and the lid would not go back on. What stayed at the bottom was hope. No one ever settled whether that was a mercy or the cruelest thing left in there, and I think that is the most honest thing anyone has said about it.
Hope scares me
Here is what I do not say out loud often: hope scares me. It is the one thing in the jar I am least sure I want.
The trick I learned young
When I was a kid I found a trick. If I decided in advance that something was not going to happen, the disappointment would land softer when it did not. So I would say it does not matter, I do not care, before I could find out either way. I got good at it. I could feel myself wanting the thing the whole time, underneath, and I would press the wanting down so the fall would be shorter.
The case against hope is old
That instinct is old. Hesiod left it unclear whether the hope sealed in the jar was a comfort kept for us or the one good withheld. Nietzsche called hope the worst of the evils, because it is the one that keeps you reaching, and so prolongs the torment. Camus called it evasion, the consolation you refuse so you can see the world without flinching.
In my own way I believed all of them. Hope is propulsive, but not always toward the good, and it charges its cost up front: the wanting itself is what can hurt you, before you ever find out. There is a kind of peace you reach by the road around hope, never through it, and I lived on that road a long time. Better hopeless, I told myself. Not pessimist. Just not holding my breath.
Interactive · the thing left in the jar
Hope is the same shape, read two ways
Hesiod sealed it in deliberately unclear. Was it a comfort kept for us, or the one good withheld? You do not get told. You decide.
The cruelty
The deceit that keeps you reaching.
Nietzsche called hope the most evil of the evils, because it is the one that prolongs the torment. It charges its cost up front: the wanting itself is what can hurt you, before you ever find out.
The mercy
The one good kept for you.
What lets you reach into the jar again. Refusing it is its own way of not getting what you want, and the confidence comes after the daring, not before it.
The armor is its own kind of lie
But refusing to hope is its own way of not getting the thing. Every time I actually bet on myself, said the wanting out loud, reached into the jar instead of deciding it was empty, the thing got more likely, not less. The confidence came after the daring, not before it. I kept waiting to feel ready and then reach, and it never worked in that order.
The jar is still open
So the jar is still open. Hope is still in there, and I do not get to know in advance whether it is the mercy or the last cruel thing. Nobody does. That was never the question. The question is whether you reach in anyway, eyes open, knowing the cost comes first.
In my own words
I do not get to know whether it is the mercy or the last cruel thing.
I am learning to reach in anyway.
The same thread, elsewhere
The myth
Pandora sits in the field guide of myths-as-lessons, alongside Sisyphus and his boulder. The jar is where this essay starts.
What the Myths Teach →The witness
Daring to want something is easier when someone sees you do it. Hope and being witnessed are the same nerve.
On Mattering →The giving
Hope handed to someone else is a form of care: the belief that the thing they want is worth reaching for.
On Care →Sources & reading
- The jar. Hesiod, Works and Days (c. 700 BC): Pandora’s pithos (a jar, not a box), and the hope (elpis) that alone remained under the rim. The text leaves it open whether that was mercy or one more trap, and the debate has run ever since.
- Hope as the worst evil. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human(1878), §71: Zeus leaves hope in the jar so that man “goes on letting himself be tormented”; hope is “the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
- Hope as evasion. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): living without appeal; hope treated as a way of dodging the absurd rather than facing it.