Easter a Reminder of the Persistence of Hope

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

E.B. White once wrote to a friend who had grown dispirited about humanity, offering not a sermon but a small act of faith: “I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.” The letter, with its plainspoken grace, is a compact argument for hope in hard times, especially during this season.

At Easter, hope is not a mood but a practice: a way of refusing to surrender to the ugliness of the hour. White’s letter gives that refusal a distinctly American dignity — modest, unsentimental, and stubbornly alive.

White’s counsel to “wind the clock” is far from some grand optimism. It is small, domestic, almost embarrassingly practical, and that is precisely why it matters. In a season built on resurrection, the gesture feels right: not a trumpet blast, but a hand on the brass edge of ordinary time, turning it back toward order.

The Easter story has never been a denial of death, only a refusal to let death have the last word. That is why White’s letter lands so cleanly in the holiday’s atmosphere. He does not pretend that the world is suddenly improved, or that cruelty has been retired from the human inventory; he simply argues that goodness is still in circulation, waiting for conditions to change. The line is especially moving because it comes without incense or performance. Hope is not a doctrinal certainty but a discipline of attention.

There is something bracing in that. We are accustomed to inflated public optimism, the sort that arrives with an expensive microphone and leaves nothing behind. White offers a more humble alternative: keep going, because there may be more good in the species than the news suggests. That is not naïveté. It is a refusal to make the worst people and the worst moments the whole story.

White’s reminder of the weather as a “great bluffer” does a great deal of work. The sky can look sealed, the horizon mean, the hour nearly over, and then a break appears where none seemed possible. Human affairs are similarly theatrical in their gloom. One can be excused for despairing, right up until the moment when the clouds move.

This is not a cheap conversion from sorrow to cheerfulness. It is closer to an editorial judgment about reality. The world is often worse than we wish and less finished than we fear. That uncertainty is where hope lives. Easter belongs there too, in the interval between apparent ending and surprising continuation.

So perhaps the act of winding our inner clock as an act of care, of maintenance, of keeping faith with time itself is in order this weekend. In a season when the language of renewal such small daily attention to detail can matter more than we might think.

For those of us who often feel spent by public life, Easter can sound like a holiday for the uninjured. It is, however, more democratic than that. Not from triumph but from a clear-eyed recognition of damage which insists on the possibility of renewal. We do not scold the doubter. We meet despair where it lives, then quietly declines to let despair dominate the room.

That may be the most persuasive kind of hope we have left. Not the flashy, conference-hall variety, but the sort that gets up, goes to the window, notices the light, and returns to the clock. On Easter morning, that is enough to begin again.