Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

Carl Sagan

[From] a line from Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star: “…as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby.” It’s an arresting thought: What if time’s ravages compelled our attention with the same ineluctable force as an earthquake? What if time were experienced not as a flow but as a phenomenon whose energy overcomes you, terrifies you, forces you to reach out in search of balance?

Jonathan Mingle, The Unimaginable Touch of Time  (NYRB, February 10, 2022)

Popular delusions occur when appealing but baseless stories spread contagiously from one person to another. Some ideas are more virulent than others: people have been found to react most enthusiastically to narratives of fear.

Edward Chancellor, "Waiting to Deflate" New York Review (August 19, 2021)

Fear is the antithesis of peace.

David Crosby

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince 

 

It rarely paid to frighten people but it never paid to confuse them.

Lifted & spun a bit from Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

Life During COVID-19

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.... A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.

Albert Camus, The Plague

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

Montainge

More Life During COVID-19

It troubles men as much that they may possibly suffer, as if they really did suffer. (Parem passis tristitiam facit, pati posse.)

Seneca, as quoted by Montaigne

He strikes at all who fears all.

Emperor Claudius, as quoted by Montaigne

There is no beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man.

Attributed by Montaigne to Emperor Julian (the Apostate)

He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?

Michel de Montaigne