“He saw the horizonless, claustrophobic hell of Bosch’s Millennium Trilogy as a prophesy of our lived reality. “What the painting by Bosch does,” he writes, “is to remind us—if prophecies can be called reminders—that the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world-picture implanted in our minds.” We must find a horizon, he wrote, and the way to do that is to “refind hope.””
“This solution, refinding hope, appears again and again throughout his writing, like a series of sturdy knots connecting the bedsheets by which we might escape from prison or descend from the ivory tower.”
“In an essay on Käthe Kollwitz, he wrote, “A sense of belonging to what-has-been and to the yet-to-come is what distinguishes man from other animals. Yet to face History is to face the tragic. Which is why many prefer to look away. To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope.””