I received Steve Garber’s Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate (2026) as a birthday present this month and promptly began to devour it. Garber is a beautiful, lyrical writer able to interweave a wide range of personal, artistic and scholarly insights. Garber has the distinctive talent of making the reader feel both smarter and more hopeful. This book is no exception.
For me, the book falls into a cluster of recent works on hope, each trying to understand how hope endures in challenging times. I reviewed Norman Wirzba’s stunning Loves Braided Dance just last year. And Garber’s work, like that of Wirzba and others, always reminds me of my favorite Jane Austen quote is from Anne found in Persuasion. “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not an enviable one you ought not covet it) is that of loving longest when existence or hope is gone.” How can we sustain hope in such a fraught and broken world? How can we maintain hope when there is no rational basis for it?
But like much in this growing genre, Garber’s book had me hooked from page 1 when in his introduction, “Seashells on the Sea Shore” he shares a quote from Summer Meditations and finds a way to connect it both to his habit of collecting shells on the beach and Leonard Cohen’s iconic Hallelujah:
So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause. – Vaclav Havel in Summer Meditations
From there I knew I was in for a treat. The book itself is a series of 6 essays that cohere loosely as a whole but also have a standalone feel. Each asks a version of the same question: can we live honestly in a way that embraces both the sorrow and the joy of everyday life? This quest for honesty at the individual level or truth at the collective level frames each essay. The space between what we desire and where we eventually find ourselves, what we want our works and lives to be and what they become, what we hope for our societyand the society that remains after all our efforts is experienced emotively, morally, ethically, and spiritually. All who think and do in an honest manner find this gap difficult to come to terms with and indeed, often depleting and paralyzing. This is especially true for professionals, especially those who approach their work as a vocation. For Garber, the approach to this question must be proximity. The essays in the book represent an array of tries by Garber to illustrate how people (primarily artists) and organizations have made peace with the proximate.
In many ways, I inhaled this book. I read it quickly on a flight. It made me feel better about the world. I wasn’t reading with any deep analytic objectives. As such, I can’t say whether it would withstand more significant scrutiny. But I am also not sure why one would need to. That seems beyond the point. The only thought I was left with was wondering how I might write a different version of this where proximity is much less about engagement with the abstract and much more an engagement with (or a proximity to) people and individuals relegated to the margins where hope seems hardest to fathom. I love to live in the world of the abstract, to seek refuge in the literature and the arts, but recognize the indulgence of momentarily forgetting the humanity outside that world and knowing it cannot or should not last.