Some Things of Which I Am Afraid

    1.     Death: when we have shuffled off that mortal coil and there are no dreams. Death, when there is no consciousness and no sense that there is no consciousness. No blackness . . . not even a sense of nothingness, but an absolute nothing. To be dead and no even know one is dead: to know nothing! It is inconceivable.
 2.     Spiders: perhaps a fear not unrelated to Number 1. Once at a day camp in Roslyn, New York, a middle-class destination for children during the summers after schools let out and when suburban parents, mostly mothers, in my experience, preferred a quiet household for at least a good part of the daytime hours. We were picked up early and returned late. On this day I awakened on the green-enough grass from an afternoon nap with a tickling sensation on my face.  I reached up to scratch it and pulled off a daddy-long legs spider. Whose presence was the trespass, I wonder? Again, at a sleep away camp in Wolfesboro, I awoke one morning to find on the window sill by my bed a wolf-spider, all big and hairy. I don’t remember my immediate response but from future fear of spiders I cannot imagine I did not scream, but in my mind the spider has grown to enormous proportions.  Now, in the outdoors I give the spiders their space, but indoors I am ruthless and pusillanimous as I at some distance squeamishly swat the creepy crawlers and then run quickly from the slaughter leaving the squashed remains to Nature.
3.     Stock Prospectuses: that appear regularly in my mailbox from my financial advisor. I don’t understand any of the economic jargon and certainly cannot discern what is being prospected. The numbers terrify me. Whenever we talk I ask him if I am rich and he responds, “Yes,” but I refer to my bank account and he refers to my quality of life. I say I know I am rich but ask if am I wealthy? To which he responds, “We’re workng on it.” I recycle the unread prospectuses.
4.     Donald Trump: whose incompetence, dishonesty, racist, misogynistic stance threatens the democracy of which he clearly hasn’t the faintest notion. I’m afraid that his ignorance will destroy us.
5.     Death. Of the mass destruction kind. An annihilation not only of the race but of the sense of earth as well. There is a poem by Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet.” He writes that when the prophet comes, as he must, it would not be useful to speak of our deaths: “Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,/Unable to fear what is too strange./Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race./How should we dream of this place without us?” How think of ourselves when there is no world from which our sense of selves derive. This fear related to #4.
6.     Aimlessness and the loneliness that stems from it. There is a line in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: real Loneliness is to live without social responsibility. Outside of the classroom I now wonder if I have become lonely and I consider how I might for the rest of my life be not lonely. Related to Nos. 1 and 5.
7.     The newspapers. Anna Wulf pastes newspaper stories on her wall believing that if she knows the news then she controls it. Alas, the newspapers only tell me how little control I finally possess and reading them only leads me to despair. Related to #4 and #5.
8.     Depression: the loss of joy and hope and purpose. In these moments I think of Camus’ The Plague: the tale Dr. Rieux had to tell “could not be one of final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.” I fear the plague. I hope to fight it. Related to all of the above.