100 Notes - 100 Thoughts nº006. Etel Adnan

In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.