Fear
Few things are more intensely personal than our fears.
They define our character in so many ways. Opposing yet sustaining our hopes and aspirations. Intimidating, yet strengthening our resolve.
We cringe from the things that frighten us, while perversely immersing ourselves. Should we seek to demystify our fears and turn them into something revelatory?
I
t is the oldest emotion. How could it not be? No other — much less love — could ensure survival in older, harsher times. And for better or for worse, for better and for worse, it remains our most defining feeling.
Fear adopts, or else we give it, multiple guises and identities. Horror, terror, fright, unease, anxiety, panic, dread and awe, suspicion, apprehension, trepidation… So many manifestations (once again, what other sentiment can claim as much?) must cause us to doubt that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself”. We can’t even be sure of the surest escape — is it in fearlessness, or the absence of fear, or in some noble kind of courage?
It preserves us and destroys us. It taunts us and mocks us and strangely consoles us.
It is innate in our nature. Yet no less is it created by our circumstance. It preserves us and destroys us. It taunts us and mocks us and strangely consoles us. Would it profit us to banish it if we could? Or might we lose through that much more than we gain?
Fear inspires more stories than anything else we feel. It was the germ of every mythology and faith, and remains a never-relenting memento mori. It inspires disgust and hints at titillation. It resists denial, is highly contagious and will, if left unchecked, become epidemic. Fear has no equal in the rendering of the human condition.
In The Secret World of Fear we are compelled (by our own inner urgings or in spite of them) to go with the poet John Berryman in insisting — “We must travel in the direction of our fear”.
