Zero Void

"Hope is the thing with feathers" - Emily Dickinson
It was this quote that gave Woody Allen the inspiration to title a collection of his short stories "Without Feathers". I learned about the poem by Emily Dickinson by reading Woody Allen. This says a great deal about my view of the world. I present the world with a fairly nihilistic vision, but somewhere inside is a twisted swirl of optimism. Another quote springs to mind: "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." That one comes from Anne Frank.
These were the ideas that competed for space in my brain as I looked at a picture of a sign posted next to the road leading to the Crandall Canyon Mine in Huntington, Utah. The wind had taken the starch out of the yellow ribbons hanging off the side, but the "HOPE" was still there. For three weeks, there have been ongoing, heroic efforts to rescue six miners trapped after a collapse on August 6. Ten days after the initial cave-in, three rescue workers died as the tunnel they were digging in the direction of the original shaft fell down on top of them.
Another ten days have passed, and now federal officials and mine managers struggle with their decision about whether or not to suspend rescue operations. The cynic in me wonders how the families of the three dead rescue workers feel. The cynic in me wonders how much money this whole thing is going to cost. Then I wonder what I would do. How would I feel to stand up there, waiting for some word? How would I feel fifteen hundred feet below the surface of the earth, waiting for an hour, a day, a month?
I don't have the answer. I know that this is only one small, tragic example of the frailty of human existence. And I also have one more quote: "We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope." - Martin Luther King, Jr.