| I got to working up a hope. The more I
worked at it, and coaxed it, and reasoned with it, the less and less chimerical
it seemed. It is the right way to do with a hope; it is like any other agriculture:
if you hoe it and harrow it and water it enough, you can make three blades
of it grow where none grew before. If you've got nothing to plant, the process
is slow and difficult, but if you've got a seed of some kind or other--any
kind will answer--you get along a good deal faster. - "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes" |
 AI image created by Barbara Schmidt |
|
...it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon
as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion,
and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then
he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done. I was born with an incurable disease, so was everybody--the same one
that every machine has--and the knowledge of the fact frightens nobody,
damages nobody; but the moment a name is given the disease, the whole
thing is changed: fright ensues, and horrible depression, and the life
that has learned its sentence is not worth the living. Medicine has its
office, it does its share and does it well; but without hope back of it,
its forces are crippled and only the physician's verdict can create that
hope when the facts refuse to create it. |
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