A Chapter on Fear

Another bout with sickness has had me trapped flat on my back for three days. Building up a tolerance for water, but only that-the one thing I am devouring is books. I have read and read and read until my eyes burn and my brain clicks and dings like a typewriter. Today I finished "Life of Pi", which I began yesterday. I read slowly so as you can imagine I have had plenty of time.

However graphic and gory in detail, this book sent electric shocks through my mind. It is the story of Pi Patel, a sixteen yr old Indian boy and sole survivor of a sunken cargo ship who finds himself on a lifeboat in the Pacific ocean with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger.

Chapter 56

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins with your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons of technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the sopt. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies, hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficut to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.