Notebook
Normally, fear seeks to conserve. Change is perceived as a risk, and thus as something dangerous. For every change can be a change for the worse. The sociologist Frank Furedi calls this the ‘conservatism of fear.’ This policy opposes change – it wishes to maintain the status quo. If it is to embrace a change, it is a matter of reaching back to something more ‘original.’
— Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear
excerpt from “Flooding,” a work-in-progress
All fear comes from our loving something.
- St. Thomas Aquinas
“To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.”
— René Magritte
To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may -- in ways we might prefer not to imagine -- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.
-Toni Morrison, Sula
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
-James Baldwin
In a very real sense, the surging water in an ocean does not move; rather, energy moves through it. In this same sense, the energy of violence moves through our culture.
-Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear
By the “algebra of need” I simply meant that, given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need — any form of need — you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible. The same is true of anyone in a state of absolute hunger, absolute fear, etc. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
-William S. Burroughs, Jaguar Magazine 1966
You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer,—
-Emily Dickinson