Archives for March 2021

Fear of Fairy Tales

"Fear lurks in everyone. The one who always asserts to not know fear is mentally damaged or a fool." Max Horkheimer (Psalm 91, Collected Writings vol 7) “Fear, accompanying such an extraordinary state, also plays a role in enchantment. The thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus described wonder as “ ‘shocked surprise’ … before the sensible appearance of a great prodigy, so that the heart experinces systole. Thus wonder is somewhat similar to fear….” Jane Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life) “Adults live in fear of one kind or another—fear of failure, poverty, isolation, fear of loss of soul in the destruction of the earth. Those fears create a mood of “being lost in the … [Read more...]

The Immunity Bath

"We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing." Charles Bukowski (Post Office) "Life and death. Already no physiology is thought scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life, life’s negation as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this…Living means dying." Freidrich Engels (Dialectic of Nature) "Fear of crime does not correlate with actual … [Read more...]