Hope Amid Despair

Under the headline "On Optimism and Despair," the December 22nd issue of The New York Review of Books includes a talk given in Berlin on November 10th by novelist Zadie Smith upon receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize (and, if I recall my college German classes, the English translation of "Welt" is "World"). In the brief but poignant talk, Ms. Smith waxes both philosophical (largely about the recent American election) and autobiographical.  Though the piece is short, I could quote several passages from it, including a beautiful passage on incremental change, but I choose to quote from the final paragraph and its sobering but hopeful beckoning:

If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world--and most recently in America--the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.