The love of liberty is the love of others;
the love of power is the love of ourselves.**
Language is our common denominator.
Literature is the opposite of dogma. A literary text lies constantly open to other readings, to other interpretations, perhaps because literature, unlike dogma, allows for both freedom of thought and for freedom of expression, and is, like those essential genes that granted us the power of imagination, self-reproductive. I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no very last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier. “Freedom of expression,” declared the Egyptian theologian Gamal Al-Banna, commenting on recent manifestations of Islamic extremism, “is an integral part of the freedom of thought. I believe that all opinions must be accepted. Otherwise, there is no freedom. Freedom can find its own limits, but to impose them from outside is contrary to its nature and risks destroying it.”
ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words
Artist: Martin Creed Words Fail Me @ MOCAD ’til January 20, 2008 Photo: NYTimes
**William Hazlitt, Political Essays, 1819
