The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

In the second version, the gods fill a box with every pain and sickness and sorrow that could possibly befall a mortal. Then, without revealing its contents, they give the box to Pandora, forbidding her ever to open it. But when curiosity gets the better of her (as they knew it would, the goal being the revenge of Zeus for Prometheus’s beneficence toward men), she lifts the lid, loosing all the evils upon the world. By the time she slams the lid shut, one thing only remains, and that is hope. What? Meaning that, as part of Zeus’s punishment, hope would always be withheld? But what was hope doing in a box of evils to begin with? That hope remains has been a common reading of the myth: no matter what evils are visited upon us, no matter how much suffering we must endure, there is always the blessing and comfort of hope to help us through. But had those evils remained inside the box, they would have had no power to harm. Shouldn’t this mean that, in order to do its good work, hope would have to be let out, too? How Nietzsche saw it: Of course hope is an evil. In