Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.
Interpretation
Fear's impact depends on one's power or control over a situation.
This quote highlights the idea that fear is not an absolute experience; instead, it varies in intensity and effect based on individual circumstances and the level of power one holds. Those who feel powerless may experience fear more acutely than those who feel in control, suggesting that fear is closely tied to one's ability to influence their surroundings.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, this quote could underscore the importance of empowerment.
At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.
You run and you run to catch up to the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again.
I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.
It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.
Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.
I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.
And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go.
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