Ambition is a two-edged sword: both creative and destructive. Debate about its value has raged since antiquity and there is a long tradition of casting ambitious women as monsters.
Rachel Hadas says that despite the cascade of scary news, humans will adapt, as they always have – and provides evidence of that resilience in the literature she loves and teaches.
Hope does not ride alone. It has a companion: anxiety. A classics scholar who is a poet notes that, at what may be the end of a long and dark pandemic year, both are in evidence.