THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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39 ELDORADO AND EDEN, THE GEOGRAPHICAL UTOPIAS
The way the earth is now,
The earth need not remain.
To spur it again
Search, till you know.Brecht
It seems so natural to man to cross the limits of space with his imagination, to sense a something beyond the horizon where the sea meets the sky, that
even in the age when the earth was still regarded as a flat disc or one which was only slightly concave on the surface, people could be led to believe that
beyond the cordon formed by the Homeric ocean there was another dwelling for mankind, another oecumene, just like the Lokaloka of Indian myth a ring
of mountains which is supposed to lie beyond the seventh sea.
A. v. Humboldt
For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; A land of
wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey;Deuteronomy 8, 7f.
The first lights
It is easy to wish we were far away from a bad place. But the road out of it is less obvious, it must first be laid. The level terrain which stretches away on all sides is just
as difficult for the right path as the mountainous terrain which blocks it off externally. That is why we lose our way, one of the bitterest situations and a strange one at
that. It lies in the extension of wanting which lacks or as yet lacks ability, of the bud which never properly bursts into bloom. The man who has lost his way stands
between the permanent wish and the impermanent or elusive path. But the danger in which the traveller is placed by losing his way, the danger of death, is also the toll
he pays for the New. It is paid wherever anything new is sparked out of the darkness, the march there is decidedly away from the comfort of our bed. Security
becomes all the more negligible, the more the familiar span of sensory perception decreases. But how significant the first light is then, how reassuring beyond all
previous measure. The desert