{"id":1525,"date":"2004-08-18T23:28:07","date_gmt":"2004-08-19T03:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/08\/18\/on-fear\/"},"modified":"2004-08-18T23:28:07","modified_gmt":"2004-08-19T03:28:07","slug":"on-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/08\/18\/on-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"On Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

From Life of Pi<\/span>, by Jann Martel:<\/p>\n

    I must say a word about fear.  It is life’s only true opponent. 
\nOnly fear can defeat life.  It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I
\nknow.  It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy.  It
\ngoes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.  It begins in
\nyour mind, always.  One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. 
\nThen fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind
\nlike a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out.  But
\ndisbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier.  Doubt does away with it with little
\ntrouble.  You become anxious.  Reason comes to do battle for you.  You are
\nreassured.  Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology.  But,
\nto your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable
\nvictories, reason is laid low.  You feel yourself weakening, wavering.  Your
\nanxiety becomes dread.
    Fear next turns fully to your
\nbody, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on.  Already
\nyour lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a
\nsnake.  Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to
\ngallop on the spot.  Your ears go deaf.  Your muscles begin to shiver as if they
\nhad malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing.  Your heart
\nstrains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much.  And so with the rest
\nof your body.  Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. 
\nOnly your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.
\n
    Quickly you make rash decisions.  You dismiss your last
\nallies:  hope and trust.  There, you’ve defeated yourself.  Fear, which is but
\nan impression, has triumphed over you.
    The matter is
\ndifficult to put into words.  For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your
\nfoundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal
\nend, nestles in your memory like a gangrene:  it seeks to rot everything, even
\nthe words with which to speak of it.  So you must fight hard to express it.  You
\nmust fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.  Because if you don’t, if
\nyour fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to
\nforget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly
\nfought the opponent who defeated you. \n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I’ve long admired Ryan<\/a>‘s review of the book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…this is not a work of fiction which exists simply for our pleasure- it aims a bit higher. This novelist has a point<\/em>,
\na morality of stories which is the moral of the story. It’s simple and
\nchallenging: If we can function with either of two stories, why not
\nchoose a better story? The moral is stated with brutal precision in
\nChapter 22, which I quote in full:<\/p>\n

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white!
\nL-L-Love! My God!”–and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the
\nagnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden
\nto dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light
\nbathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the
\nb-b-brain” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better
\nstory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a provocation both of serious believers and of skeptics,
\nboth of whom feel that much more is at stake than a simple aesthetic or
\nliterary choice. It’s also a point that could only be made in our
\nmodern West, this singular space where we indeed have the choice of our
\nfaiths. The mockery of the narrow minds of the priest, the pandit, and
\nthe imam in Chapter 23, the cheerful ecumenical universalism of Pi,
\nthis whole notion of the capability of choice, the very concept of
\nmapping faith onto story<\/em>– all these allow us to locate Martel
\nsquarely in the present, in the consumer-consumed marketplace of
\nbelievers and faiths. All this could have made the book a tiresome
\nrehashing of the “All you need is faith: any faith will do” genre of
\nliterary and cinematic works. (Signs<\/i>, anyone? Dogma<\/i>?)<\/p>\n

But Martel does something amazing in Life of Pi<\/i>. He exposes
\nhis readers to a world of doubles, and he leaves us with terrible
\nchoices. All of the choices in the work, all of the stories offered to
\nthe reader are full of savagery and horror, the naked power of death,
\nthe remorseless brutality which underlies every will to live. If this
\nbook fulfills its brash promise, if it does<\/em> convince anyone
\nto believe in God, to choose the better story, the reader will also be
\nconfronted with the inescapable terror of that choice, the fundamental
\ndarkness. No matter which story we choose, we are hopelessly trapped on
\nPi’s floating island of algae, that occult land on which we were always
\nalready standing, that paradise of food and comfort and danger and
\nall-consuming death. It is this layer of persistent danger, amorality,
\nand darkness that saves Life of Pi<\/i> from being yet another vacuous exhortation to faith, and transforms it into a nuanced, provocative, and delightful work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Life of Pi, by Jann Martel:     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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-oB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}