Thank you from Artists for Peace!

Thank you for your support during Montreal ceremonies marking the indelible memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, organized by Mayor Pierre Bourque (Montreal).

Thank you for the undeniable love shown as an astrophysicist to our planet, supporting the recommendations of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the requirements of the UN.

Thank you for the humility of your blue gaze knowing how to consider humanity with your benevolence as a committed humanist and ecologist, demonstrated in the NFB films filmed by Yolande Cadrin-Rossignol in 2003, Hubert Reeves: Star Teller, in 2011, Dialogues under the starry sky and the very recent in June 2023, The ocean seen from the heart, thus taking up titles from several of your works.

Without guilt-inducing morality, the affectionate grandfather favored a gentle approach to, with Frédéric Lenoir, persuade us of the need to leave a habitable world to our children. In The Time to Get Drunk (1986), the affection becomes rough as it paints a worrying portrait of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.

Hubert Reeves at the Paris Book Fair

The chronic inability of humans not to descend into stupidity and horror is a major stumbling block to any “optimistic” interpretation of the meaning of reality and evolution.

A second message that is even more difficult to receive: the horror will surely return. If so far it has spared us, it is because we have been lucky.

We must prepare to face it.
REFUSE to participate even passively.
Practice saying no.
Escape the endless logistics of revenge. (…)
There is always a good reason and the massacres continue in an endless sequence. Global refusal is the only possible way out.

The price to pay is to lose your life.

The prize to be won is to save “the” life, [i.e. to save life]

Hubert Reeves, in Space, takes the form of my gaze. Éditions l’Essentiel (pages 89-90) – a 1995 text illustrated with photographs by Mohror, classified in the bibliothèque Sciences (Sciences library) by Garneau bookstores.

His adventure as a poet began in 1981 with Patience d’Azur (Patience in the azure). Touted during the popular show “Apostrophes” by Bernard Pivot, the book sold a million copies and was translated into thirty languages.

Our condolences to his son and colleague at UQAM (University of Quebec in Montreal), Nicolas Reeves, full professor NXI GESTATIO Design Lab [arts design computer architecture].

Pierre Jasmin, Artists for Peace