Hope doesn’t fail. It’s disappointed but it does not fail.

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
          A.R. Ammons, "Corsons Inlet"

–“Who said: I study not to learn but hoping/What I’ve learned might not be true?,” poet C.K. Williams asks.

–If we are to believe philosopher Kant, the three most important questions remain entirely future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?

–Hope, another philosopher, Ernst Bloch put, is something not bargained down. Hope is not traded off. It is disappointed, but it does not fail.

–John Berger, essayist, novelist, and painter:

The other day I saw a lorry carting blocks of stone, white in the sunlight, from the quarries on the other side of the village. On top of the blocks was a wooden box with tools in it. On top of them, carefully placed so that it should not blow away, lay a sprig of cherry blossom. In the rockface is buried the promise of dynamite: in the dynamite the promise of space: in the space grows the promise of a tree: in the core of the tree the promise of blossom. That was the relationship between the spray and the blocks of stone on the lorry.

Some call this intersection of practice and possibility, hope.