Creating Dangerously: ‘Spare Us from Living in Interesting Times’
To create today is to create dangerously.
-Albert Camus
As society slowly opens up, I felt myself closing in - and with that came a considerable silence. There’s been a higher intake than output of writing on my part and I have been absorbing Infinite Jest, The Leopard, and Albert Camus’ essays vivaciously. In Camus’ essay, “Create Dangerously”, he writes something that I am sure cannot help but resonate with many of us as we enter a slightly altered world:
‘An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence’ (1).
I had always hoped to experience and take part in ‘interesting times’, having the following line Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov particularly strike me due to obvious reasons: ‘farewell, Katerina Ivanovna, may your life be as thrillingly tragic as you hope it to be’…
Yet, creating in an ‘interesting’ and ‘thrillingly tragic’ reality is, as Camus writes, a foolproof method for one to desperately turn back to the divinities and pray they be spared from ever again having to live through such “interesting” times.
As for the artists, creating anything at all becomes a volatile minefield of ‘longing to be exceptional, feeling guilty if they are not, and wishing for simultaneous applause and hisses’ (Camus, 11). My one appeal to you, then, is to nonetheless ‘create dangerously’. Art is, in a sense, a ‘revolt against anything fleeting’ (Camus, 15), and being a revolt, will always contain its risks. But nonetheless, though ‘one may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing’ (32), we have been dealt with the hand, as most before us, of living in interesting times. Thus comes the call for responsible artists whose call is to awaken the truth, however interesting it may be.
Thought of the Day
Creating in an ‘interesting’ and ‘thrillingly tragic’ reality is, as Camus writes, a foolproof method for one to desperately turn back to the divinities and pray they be spared from ever again having to live through such “interesting” times. But nonetheless, though ‘one may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing’ (32), we have been dealt with the hand, as most before us, of living in interesting times. Thus comes the call for responsible artists whose call is to awaken the truth, however interesting it may be.
-Gabriela Milkova
Stay inspired.
