Hope is life. When we hope we know we are alive. We know we still care about our own life, about collective human life, and about the planet we tenaciously and tenuously inhabit. When I consider Levi’s youthful adult life permeated with cynicism—as he and his peers expressed that mood, that philosophical approach to life in “sad, crepuscular poems,” and his protection against radical disappointment, as Helen Small in The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time has described a defensive mechanism of cynicism, through Auschwitz and after that time in the free world—I cannot capitulate to despair.