Last week, in his column at When Falls the Coliseum, Michael Cade concluded by presenting his readers with what is surely an important question: How do YOU deal with fear?

Daniel Kalder posted a comment wondering what I might think about the question and later on Michael himself posted a comment wondering the same thing. So I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days.

I like to think I have a high fear threshold. But I realize that has to do with a clear and present danger. Whenever I have thought myself to be in danger I have generally not wasted any time worrying about it, concentrating instead on what the hell to do about it.

Many years ago I found myself late at night walking through a not-so-nice neighborhood toward Union Station in Chicago. I was new to Chicago, but I was a city boy, so not unduly naïve. It became apparent that I had been noticed and was probably being followed by more than one person. It was dark, it was late, and the only people around were me and whoever it was who had noticed me. 

Now, one thing you never do in such circumstances is start walking fast. In fact, adopting a more leisurely pace is not a bad idea. It makes the pursuers wonder. (I used to walk home from The Philadelphia Inquirer at night with a sword-stick. A guy who took it upon himself to follow me — we had had a brusque encounter at one point — changed his mind when I walked down a dark and narrow side street.)

Anyway, I just continued walking at a measured pace and … nothing happened. I got to the station and took the train to Hinsdale, where I was staying at the time.

I felt much more fear afterward than I had while walking. And that has been my experience throughout my life: When you actually are in danger, you don’t experience fear so much as a heightened, almost exhilarating sense of alertness. Afterwards, you experience a kind of retroactive terror.

Fear, in a sense, is a kind of negative daydreaming. You have to do something tomorrow that you’re afraid of doing. This could be something as trivial as having to give a talk or something as potentially fatal as going into battle. Almost certainly, when the thing you’re worried about happens, you’ll be too preoccupied — either with saying what you have on your mind or focusing on not being killed — to experience any fear.

There is, however, another kind of fear, one that has little to do with an actual clear and present danger. It is also one that we tend to have always with us, lurking in some shadowy corner of the mind. It is what Kierkegaard called dread. It is the anxiety that seems to accompany being itself. As Eliot puts it in Prufrock: “…I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”

Eliot offers another image of this existential fear in The Waste Land:

                                                         Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I remember how, when I first read these lines, a shiver of recognition ran through me. Though I was very young, I knew what Eliot was talking about, and didn’t need anyone to explain it to me. This past weekend my wife and I visited an old friend of mine. He and I have known each other for half a century. Later, I awoke in the middle of the night and was suddenly aware, profoundly aware, of the passage of time and of how little time was left. “And in short, I was afraid.”

How does one deal with that? In my case, the default setting of my personality — shallowness — switched on and I went back to sleep. But I did think of it again the next day. It is, of course, the sort of thing we deal with all the time by distracting ourselves. “Distraction from distraction by distraction,” to quote Eliot again.

But distracting ourselves from something isn’t dealing with it, but running from it. The other night, I at least had the presence of mind to look directly at the fear I was experiencing. Everything, even fear, is interesting if you observe it closely enough. I think that was why my default shallowness kicked in. There was, after all, nothing I could do about the passage and the dwindling of time. Might as well go back to sleep.

In fact, the only way to deal with fear, it seems to me, is to confront it. Look it directly in the eye as it were. If we do, we discover that what we are afraid of isn’t really there yet, and may never be.

Nevertheless, that generic fear of what may come to pass will remain with us as long as we avoid looking at it. J. Krishnamurti perhaps put it best: “What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.”

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

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