Despair, bad news, and grimness bolster an identity the teller can affect, one that is tough enough to face the facts. Some of them, anyway. (Some of the facts remain in the dark.) The outcome is usually uncertain, but for some reason tales of decline and fall have an authority that hopeful ones don’t. Buddhists sometimes decry hope as an attachment to a specific outcome, to a story line, to satisfaction. But beyond that is an entirely different sort of hope: that you possess the power to change the world to some degree or just that the world is going to change again, and uncertainty and
...more
