The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Paul Loeb on Perseverance & Hope in Troubled Times

“If you have a space of democracy that is closing, you have infinitely more leverage to act before it closes than after.” — Paul Rogat Loeb

The Impossible Will Take a Little While is an anthology of essays, speeches, memoirs and poems about perseverance & hope in troubled times. Edited and introduced by Paul Rogat Loeb, the anthology came out in 2004, in the middle of the Bush years and the Iraq war, and now has 125,000 copies in print. Colleges assigned it across the curriculum. One of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Loeb he reached for it at the points where he had hit the wall and wasn’t sure he could keep going.

In 2026, many of us feel we’ve hit a wall and aren’t sure we can keep going. So it’s apt that Loeb has reworked his book to suit what seems to be our particularly troubled times. Classic essays from Havel, Mandela, Neruda and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail all remain in the anthology. But this edition has also been comprehensively rebuilt. New work includes Navalny’s prison journals, essays from Jesmyn Ward & Rutger Bregman and a chapter on the South Korean coup. What’s changed over the last couple of decades, Loeb says, is the routinization of surveillance, the attacks on democratic institutions, and the daily reality of climate disaster.

Hope, Loeb reminds us, isn’t blind optimism. His most hopeful stories in the new anthology are about people who weren’t heroes. In Seoul in December 2024, as troops moved to shut the parliament, one detachment stopped for ramen noodles. They had their orders, Loeb says, but food came before politics. In Norway in 1942, eleven thousand teachers simply declined to teach fascism. So history often isn’t made by Havel, MLK or Mandela-style heroes. Hope, then, lies in the action and sometimes inaction of ordinary people. In Seoul noodle restaurants or Norwegian classrooms or on the streets of Minneapolis.

FURTHER READING

•   Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While (Basic Books, 13 October 2026). Full contents and excerpts.

•   Loeb also wrote Soul of a Citizen and Generation at the Crossroads, and founded the nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project. More.

•   The Korean chapter is Jungmin Choi’s “Lightsticks and K-Pop”. The Norwegian teachers are Loeb’s own essay, “Refusing to be Quislings”.

•   The Berlin story AK asks for is the Rosenstrasse protest of February 1943.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He Doesn’t Believe the Arc Bends

Asked whether the arc of history bends toward justice, Loeb says no. It can bend, depending on how we act. What he has instead is Havel’s distinction, written in 1986 when the Czech dictatorship looked permanent: optimism expects things to turn out, hope is what lets you act when they might not.

2. Panels on the Ground in Pakistan

Solar output doubled in two years, then again in one. Pakistani farmers skip the permits and the installers and simply lay panels on the ground — a third of the grid displaced in a year, and panels now turning up in wedding dowries. But prices collapsed because the German Greens pushed through subsidies. Citizen action made the technology cheap.

3. Berlin, 1943: The Wives on Rosenstrasse

Pressed on whether readers might cast themselves as martyrs when Mandelstam’s Russia and the present are