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Writer's pictureJeh Bruce

2020--Schrödinger's Elpis?

Updated: Jan 3, 2020


There's a quote from a Peter Capaldi episode of Dr. Who (yes, I'm one of those fans), written by Steven Moffat, one of the most über talented of the Dr. Who writers (and who also created, if memory serves, the very popular and clever modern-day reboot of Sherlock) that has encapsulated my ever deepening bleak mood towards the onslaught of bad news followed in quickstep by even worse news, which is then tumbled to bits in the tsunami of even more frightening and yes, paralyzing news of the past year and which overshadows this one: "That's the problem with hope. It makes you afraid." And I'm reminded too of the now all too prescient story of Pandora, where all that was left trapped inside the pithos was hope. Was preventing the sprite Elpis (hope) from escaping a good thing, or bad? Did Zeus' will stop Elpis, as the fable goes, in order to make humankind suffer for disobeying the gods (by accepting fire from Prometheus)--making the ills of the world that we are now confronting, ills that people even 50 years ago, much less the ancient Greeks, could have hardly imagined, as the ultimate price for, ironically, fire? A novel I wrote over a decade ago, and which I resurrected and now have out with a publisher, revolved around the concept of Pandora's box, and how humanity has suffered for that original mistake of accepting a gift without fully grasping the strings that were attached.

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