If you note in the previous blogposting on the "art" I wrote Camus 1946... and that reference is to his dictum I'll share below, one I discovered in grad school eons ago...
It has been one of the guiding quotes, poetic, philosophic, political, historical... and educational... of which I have not found one quote to equal its power on me... and of which I cite often in my work, almost like a signature "sound" that Beethoven or some musician might put on all their work, and most would not notice it. Here it is, something translated from Fr. which he wrote from the underground movement (The Resistance) in France during the Nazi Occupation, and it was published c. 1946 in the underground newspaper Combat:
THE 17TH CENTURY WAS THE CENTURY OF MATHEMATICS;
THE 18TH CENTURY THAT OF PHYSICS;
THE 19TH CENTURY OF BIOLOGY; AND
THE 20TH CENTURY IS THE CENTURY OF FEAR.
I always add my own last line: The 21st century is the century of terror. Yet, what does this mean to me? It means that I am as much a mathematician, physicist, biologist and now fearologist attempting to make some new great discovery for the century of which I have lived. I call myself at times a theoretical fearologist and nobody gets it.
What is there to get? I simply ask that one reads my work with the same sincerity as all of the knowledge pursuits of the last 300+ yrs. I ask that people reflect on what Camus's quote and insight may mean? I have interpreted it many ways, but the simplest is... if the 20th century has turned out to be a century of fear then we ought to really study that as the new discipline of importance--thus, I have called for fearology, and 'Fear' Studies, etc. So far, this has little been taken seriously.
The next powerful quote that has stayed with me (and there are others too) is from the scholar Ruth N. Anshen in the mid-1960s as she was describing the shifting emphasis to which knowledge itself ought to be used--all in the context of the crises in the 20th century that were pointing to a rather gloomy future for humankind. She wrote, "Knowledge... no longer consists in a manipulation of man [sic] and nature of opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to statistical order, but is a means of liberating [hu]mankind from the destructive power of fear."
Put Camus's discovery together with Anshen's conclusion... and we are in the realm of prophetic vision and work, of which I have documented here, and will do so in the future--like a graffiti artist... like a madman... like a shaman... like a mailman... always with a message at your door, if you open it up!
