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being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good.
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.�
But seriously, how could you tell someone, in good conscience, to “have a nice day� while knowing that all their thoughts and motivations stem from a never-ending need to avoid the inherent meaninglessness of human existence?
These hope narratives are then what give our lives a sense of purpose. Not only do they imply that there is something better in the future, but also that it’s actually possible to go out and achieve that something.
Waits’s quip about the lobotomy makes us laugh, but there’s a hidden wisdom to it: that he’d rather have the problem of passion with the bottle than have no passion at all; that it’s better to find hope in lowly places than to find none; that without our unruly impulses, we are nothing.
