Hope: A Tragedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

the very thing he’d feared the past month and a half—a house fire—might, as it turned out, have been the best thing that could have possibly happened. Combing through the smoldering wreckage, the police would find the body of some old lady, but at least she would be gone, out of his hair, and the insurance on the house would pay off handsomely.
    Bree shifted, turned on her side, and mumbled something in her sleep.
    She isn’t going to like this, Kugel thought as he watched her. She isn’t going to like this at all. He’d already allowed one crazy old lady into the house—his mother—and they were still waiting for her to die.
    A physician, said Professor Jove, is but a criminal dealer of the narcotic of hope.
    Kugel got to his feet and slid quietly back into bed.
    Kugel first began seeing Professor Jove the previous year, soon after Jonah’s illness. Kugel was having a difficult time sleeping; the anxiety and anger that had been building within him for some time were threatening to spill over, and he was determined to do whatever was necessary to be the husband Bree deserved and the father Jonah needed. He’d seen analysts in the past, but psychiatry was too narrow a scope for him now. Professor Jove, however, was a polymath; not just a Jungian or a Freudian, not just a Kantian or a Cartesian; he had studied the ancients and the moderns, the Realists and Impressionists, he had studied everyone from Aristotle to Zarathustra, from Democritus to Heraclitus and, as he liked to say, all the Ituses in between. He was, in a sense, the distillation of all of Western and Eastern thought of the past two thousand years combined, and it was Professor Jove’s opinion, standing as only someone today could, on the twenty-first-century peak of all history, heir to all mankind’s experience, wisdom, and knowledge, that the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion.
    It was hope.
    Hope? Kugel asked.
    Pessimists, Professor Jove replied, don’t start wars. It was hope, according to Professor Jove, that was keeping Kugel up at night. It was hope that was making him angry.
    Give Up, read the sign on the wall behind Jove’s book-covered desk, You’ll Live Longer.
    But you’ve been to Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, said Kugel.
    That’s how I know, said Professor Jove.
    Kugel had waited weeks for an appointment.
    We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.
    Kugel wasn’t sure he understood. Professor Jove smiled warmly.
    Tell me, he said. Hitler was the last century’s greatest what?
    Kugel had shrugged.
    Monster?
    Optimist, said Professor Jove. Hitler was the most unabashed doe-eyed optimist of the last hundred years. That’s
why
he was the biggest monster. Have you ever heard of anything as outrageously hopeful as the Final Solution? Not just that there could be a solution—to anything, mind you, while we have yet to cure the common cold—but a final one, no less! Full of hope, the Führer was. A dreamer! A romantic, even, yes? If I just kill this one, gas that one, everything will be okay. I tell you this with absolute certainty: every morning, Adolf Hitler woke up, made himself a cup of coffee, and asked himself how to make the world a better place. We all know his answer, but the answer isn’t nearly as important as the question. The only thing more naively hopeful than the Final Solution is the ludicrous dictum to which it gave birth: Never Again. How many times since Never Again has it happened again? Three? Four? That we know of, mind you. Mao? Optimist. Stalin? Optimist. Pol Pot? Optimist. Here’s a good rule for life, Kugel, no matter