This book looks more promising than I thought....

[novapsyche]

We have not begun to gauge the damage to man--as a species, as one entitling himself sapiens--inflicted by events since 1914. We do not begin to grasp the co-existence in time and in space . . . .

What I want to consider briefly is something of the impact of this darkened condition on grammar. Where I take grammar to mean the articulate organization of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others. I intuit (these are, of course, almost wholly conjectural domains) that the future tense came relatively late into human speech. It may have developed as late as the end of the last Ice Age, together with the "futurities" entailed by food-storage, by the making and preservation of tools beyond immediate need, and by the very gradual discovery of animal-breeding and agriculture. In some meta- or pre-linguistic register, animals appear to know presentness and, one supposes, a measure of remembrance. The future tense, the ability to discuss possible events on the day after one's funeral or in stellar space a million years hence, looks to be specific to homo sapiens. [...]

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 unfulfillment. Fear has in it a mustard-seed of hope, the intimation of overcoming. . . . "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. . . . Hope would be meaningless in a wholly irrational order or in one of arbitrary, absurdist ethics. Hope, as it has structured the human psyche and behaviour, is only trivially operative where reward and punishment are determined by lottery (gamblers' hopes at roulette are exactly of this vacant order).

-- George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (2001), pp. 7-8.

Comments

[kittenkissies.livejournal.com]

1914? I think Gavrio Princep is one of the fathers of the technological revolution. He is the man who shot the Duke and Archduchess of Ferdinand, starting WWI.
Nothing like good reward and punishment....