I am indebted to my parents, learned, urbane, fair-minded and liberal, for instilling a love of books and an appreciation for music, art and philosophy, for sparing me the enslavement of religious indoctrination and for enduring, if not always endorsing, my wildest antics. To my mother, a selfless, unassuming woman of great culture and refinement, I owe my fondness for beauty and symmetry. From my father, a loving, iron-willed and incorruptible man who abhorred ostentation and pretense, I learned that self-esteem and a respect for truth bestow infinitely greater rewards than money or a good reputation.
I salute my teachers, those I pleased when I applied myself and those I exasperated when I didn’t. Their erudition, pedagogical skills and saintly patience for the lazy, unfocused, mercurial and rebellious student I was helped lay the foundations on which I would erect a lifetime career of endless beginnings.
I can never sufficiently acknowledge the immense influence a number of prominent writers, poets and philosophers had on the constantly evolving person I would become and, by extension, on the ideas I would champion. Their prose, verses, insights and eye-opening reflections resonate as intensely today as they did in the days of my youth. Most were French. Of these, one was denied a Christian funeral for penning vitriolic anti-religious polemics; five were imprisoned: one for denouncing the brutality of colonialism; the other for suggesting that the blind can be taught to read through the sense of touch; the third, the son of a prostitute, for vagabondage, lewd acts and “other offenses against public decency;” the fourth, for stretching the limits of literary freedom in tracts that mixed raw eroticism with civil disobedience. The fifth spoke for the common man and rose with uncommon bravery against government and military corruption.
My other mentors wrote in Arabic, English, Dutch, German, Russian, Sanskrit and Spanish. Three hailed from England; one of them did not survive the spurious puritanism of his Victorian milieu. One died insane -- as do many who seek shelter from the battering storm of reality in the haven of delirium. All were freethinkers, rebels and iconoclasts, now long dead, but whose works and the reformist ideas they impart still inspire new generations of radicals-in-training.