It seems to me that this fantastic, formally incommensurable 'grammatology' of verb futures, of subjunctives and optatives, proved indispensable to the survival, to the evolution of the 'language animal' confronted, as we were and are, by the scandal, by the incomprehensibility of individual death. There is an actual sense in which every human use of the future tense of the verb 'to be' is a negation, however limited, of mortality. Even as every use of an 'if'-sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, of the despotism of the fact. 'Shall', 'will' and 'if', circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden centre or nucleus of potentiality, are the passwords to hope. Hope and fear are supreme fictions empowered by syntax. They are as indivisible from each other as they are from grammar.
Hope encloses a fear of unfulfilment.
Fear has in it a mustard seed of hope, the intimation of overcoming. It is the status of hope today which is problematic. On any but the trivial, momentary level, hope is a transcendental inference. Hoping' is a speech act, inward or outwardly communicative, which 'presumes' a listener, be it the self. Of this act, prayer is an exemplary case.