No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope
Alexander Kluge:
It is a mamtter of observation that there are limits to what people will put up with. At unexpected points that cannot be determined in advance, people develop a will of their own. No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope. What we can do is devote boundless effort to the concrete areas in which we ourselves work. Whether that will prove useful in teh end is, to put it melodramatically, in God’s hands; but you could also say that it’s in all of our hands. Human willfulness is reliable and invincible. It returns again and again. It is a phoenix.
Quoted in Jenny Erpenbeck’s “On ‘On the Book of Words,’” Bamberg Lecture II, reprinted in Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, p. 110.
