Comfort

Somewhere

Hope is a beautiful thing to find in art or stories or music. It is often a surprise moment, like in The Shawshank Redemption when the poster of Raquel Welch is pulled off the wall in Andy’s prison cell. Or in The Sound of Music when Captain von Trapp switches from repressed widower to singing father in the space of a single scene.

It is often subtle, but you know it when you feel it. Like when “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” effortlessly goes up a whole octave within the word “somewhere,” jumping clean over seven natural keys—an actual musical rainbow—before landing on the eighth. Hope always involves a soaring and a reaching. Hope flies. The thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said.

People often imagine it is hard to feel hopeful when times are hard, yet I tend to think the opposite. Or at least, hope is the thing we most want to cling on to in periods of despair or worry. I think that it’s no coincidence that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of the most bittersweet yet hopeful songs in the world, a song that has topped polls as the greatest song of the twentieth century, was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for The Wizard of Oz in one of the bleakest years in human history: 1939. Harold wrote the music, while Yip penned the words. Harold and Yip themselves were no strangers to suffering. Yip had seen the horrors of the First World War and was left bankrupt following the crash of 1929. As for Harold, who would become known for his hopeful octave-leaping, he was born with a twin brother who sadly died in infancy. Aged sixteen, Harold fled his Jewish Orthodox parents and went to pursue a modern musical path. And let’s not forget these were two Jewish musicians writing arguably the most hopeful song ever written, all while Adolf Hitler was triggering war and antisemitism was on the rise.

To feel hope you don’t need to be in a great situation. You just need to understand that things will change. Hope is available for all. You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark. We can have our feet right here where we are, while our minds can hear another octave, right over the rainbow. We can be half inside the present, half inside the future. Half in Kansas, half in Oz.