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Hmm.
Though hope is essentially seen as a word with a positive meaning, I don’t think it’s always so. You often hear people say: “All we can do now is hope” and that is often paired with a sigh or a depressed look. Hoping is not really ‘fun’. It’s what you do when all else has failed. In that sense I think hoping is closer to despair than anything else in the world: because when hope fails, there is only despair left, but while a person refrains from merely hoping and actually goes out and do something possibly productive, despair is still a long way off.
I think it’s quite likely Aragorn was just trying to sound deep and meaningful, but otherwise I’d explain it along the same lines as Farael seems to be doing. However, as I more or less said above, I personally believe hope and despair are always akin and so closely related it may not be a paradox at all.
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