On Hope and Holy Fools

There is nothing very sexy about hope. Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace. The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe. Hope has little aesthetic appeal. Hope is the awkward comic reversal, shoehorned in like the end of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, which rewrites the Greek myth to have the doomed lovers be reunited by none other than the soprano-singing personification of love itself.