June 20, Thursday. First meditation
June 20, Thursday. First meditation on fear.
What was this fear?
It was dark and without a name; if it had a name I would not have been afraid any more. But one way of getting at the shape of it, and the reason that it was set off by Amadtaed’s story, is to describe it thus:
It is the sensation that all I know of reality as I experience it is a false facade. What I have thought to have been real, and true, and substantial matters for happiness, have only been the false lights thrown on me by my fortunate situation. What is the reality? "It’s best not to ask." Everybody knows that horror is around them but no one can do anything about it, no one can bring it out into the light. There is not even anything definite about the terrible fates that befall those who slip between the cracks.
And here we are, between the cracks indeed. What have I done wrong? What have I done wrong? There are three girls without a home tonight, without a door to lock behind them. There are three girls for whom interior space is more distant and unwelcoming, more hostile and terrifying, more irredemiable foreign, than exterior space. There are three American students who did not find a room tonight.
One of them is me.
I have failed them. I have failed myself. Why am I not rejoicing in this adventure? They admit their weakness. You do not. Why were you not able to save them? Why could you not embrace the world?
There is nothing to embrace. There is nothing. It always horrified and distressed me, in a pale image of the horror and distress at work within me now, when I was reading books and read of someone being kidnapped or extorted or otherwise in some desperate situation, right in the middle of life as normal. So close, so terribly close, to salvation! I the reader would ahve saved you, all you would have to would be to stretch out your and, to throw yourself upon my mercy. I have read your book. I know your story. I would have helped. Nothing but the veil of words separates us.
And how many would have helped us that night, if we had been characters in a book, if they had been reading our story! But no one ever can do that, and so there is this gulf, terrible and unseen, between the self and the rest of the world.
Why? Why did I fear so much? It is not the mere circumstance of not going to sleep tonight. At home I would stay up to see the dawn in and think nothing of it. It was something that this event signified in my mind, something far beyond and indeed mostly irrelevant to the circumstance of shelter and not-shelter, something poisonous.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
October 12th, 2002 at 5:47 amYou, the center, the strong one, the protector could not hold; and so mere anarchy was unleashed upon your world.
A cause for fear indeed.