Gefühle am Ende der Welt | Folge 15: VERHEISSUNG

PROMISE, in the religious sense, is a vow with a fateful character. As a strange amalgam of prophecy and mission, promise spans a bridge from an almost unbearable present to a heavenly—or at least better—future. Technology and progress have sought to take over the promises of religion, announcing a world without work, without distance, without death—and all this within the limits of natural resources. But even as these concrete promises lose their power to convince, something promising remains indispensable if one is to keep going in the mundane and often discouraging everyday. An evening can be full of promise, a place, or even a glance. Increasingly, it is not the specific promises themselves that matter, but openness as such—not so much a better order, but the promise that, despite all necessities, something unexpected can still happen. Thus, promise perhaps becomes most tangible as closeness to another person or to a very good idea. To be seduced, or to discover something together—these are two modes of promise that share the ability to move us somewhere we have not yet been.