"Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made"
About this Quote
Hope, for Lu Xun, is not a warm inner glow but a public infrastructure project. He strips it of metaphysics: it neither "exists" nor "doesn't". It's contingent, provisional, almost embarrassingly practical. The roads metaphor is doing quiet revolutionary work. Roads feel natural once they harden into habit, but they start as repeated choices - footsteps that agree, over time, to become a direction.
That logic lands harder in Lu Xun's context: a China shaken by collapse, warlord politics, and the suffocating afterlife of old orthodoxies. As a leading voice of the May Fourth era, he distrusted slogans that anesthetize. "Hope" can easily become a narcotic, a story people tell themselves while nothing changes. So he reframes it as something closer to collective action: not belief, but motion; not consolation, but coordination.
The subtext is a rebuke to both fatalism and cheap optimism. If there are no roads, it's not destiny; it means no one has walked together long enough to make one. And if a road exists, it's not proof of moral progress; it's proof of traffic. The line also carries a warning: roads can lead anywhere, including to ruin, if the crowd keeps choosing the same route. Lu Xun's hope is bracingly unsentimental: it asks for footsteps, not faith, and it holds people responsible for the world their repeated choices carve into something that later generations will mistake for inevitability.
That logic lands harder in Lu Xun's context: a China shaken by collapse, warlord politics, and the suffocating afterlife of old orthodoxies. As a leading voice of the May Fourth era, he distrusted slogans that anesthetize. "Hope" can easily become a narcotic, a story people tell themselves while nothing changes. So he reframes it as something closer to collective action: not belief, but motion; not consolation, but coordination.
The subtext is a rebuke to both fatalism and cheap optimism. If there are no roads, it's not destiny; it means no one has walked together long enough to make one. And if a road exists, it's not proof of moral progress; it's proof of traffic. The line also carries a warning: roads can lead anywhere, including to ruin, if the crowd keeps choosing the same route. Lu Xun's hope is bracingly unsentimental: it asks for footsteps, not faith, and it holds people responsible for the world their repeated choices carve into something that later generations will mistake for inevitability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Hope |
|---|---|
| Source | Lu Xun (鲁迅), short story "Hometown" (故乡), 1921 , contains the line often translated as "Hope is like a path in the countryside..." (orig.: "希望本来是无所谓有，无所谓无的。这正像地上的路；其实地上本没有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。") |
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