Topical Guide 574
Mark Dorset
Anticipation
Hope
Memory
Misunderstanding
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 5:
Prowling through the unfinished school building had made me begin to feel a thrilling anticipation of seventh grade that in memory is so thoroughly mixed with the thrill of danger that I can’t quite tell them apart.
My hopes for a new school year had never been greater. I always felt an anticipatory thrill before a new school year, the anticipation of novelty. […]
As Raskol and I understood this game, we were the only players. In our minds, we were everything: the center of the contest and all its area and edges as well. The watchman was just a dupe. When he had passed and we came out of hiding, we would wink at each other, deliver ourselves of theatrical sighs, and laugh silently at his ineptitude, but we never noticed what, with the finer perception memory sometimes supplies, I hear quite clearly now—the watchman’s jolly chuckle, receding with his footsteps.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope:
That within us which makes us capable of being stimulated, we have said, does not stimulate itself. It sleeps warm and at the same time in darkness, wakes itself up least of all with feeling. Even the feeling of internal and external stimuli, at the point where these plunge into the Now, participates in the latter’s darkness. Just as little as the eye can see at its blind spot, where the nerve enters the retina, is what has just been experienced perceived by any sense. This blind spot in the mind, this darkness of the lived moment, must nevertheless be thoroughly distinguished from the darkness of forgotten or past events. When past material is increasingly covered by night, this night can be lifted, memory helps out, sources and finds can be excavated, in fact historically past material, even if only patchily, is especially objectifiable precisely for contemplative consciousness. The darkness of the just lived moment, on the other hand, stays in its bed-chamber; topical consciousness only exists precisely in relation to an experience which has just passed or for an expected advancing experience and its content.
See also:
Anticipation, Disappointment TG 98; Anticipation; Suspense; Impatience TG 160
Hopes and Fears TG 63; Hope versus Despair (or Fear) TG 109
Memory TG 57, TG 125; Memory, Faulty: Causes of, Results of TG 34, TG 133; Memory, Remembering, Forgetting, and the Search for Lost Time TG 22; Memory, Faulty, Causes of Distortion in TG 97; Memories: Relationships Among; Relationships to Present Perceptions TG 463
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