We can, and we should read our contemporaries, but we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that certain questions that trouble us today were answered already by people who lived two or more centuries before us. They’re our next of kin.
“I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves…”
Antonin Artaud