“Concern stalks the land, together with the Higher West Facet,” I wrote to a pal the opposite day. Per week earlier than the election, everybody appears to be afraid.
Not that we’re afraid of the identical issues. Newspaper house owners and company leaders worry Donald Trump’s retribution in the event that they endorse Kamala Harris. Election staff worry the mob. Democrats worry dropping votes due to the carnage within the Gaza Strip. Trump’s followers worry immigrants.
Walled up in our silos, we worry what the individuals within the different silo may inflict on us. The scary visions have totally different names and faces, however everybody appears to worry the long run.
Halloween’s ghoulish shows appear to have generated extra gross sales than ever this 12 months, inflation be damned. What with college shootings, random violence and a normal environment of threats, one would assume we didn’t must scare ourselves extra.
Jack Vimes through Getty
However as psychologist Sarah Kollat has not too long ago written, Halloween thrills and chills can really feel warming and reassuring. Individuals who have survived a daunting shared ordeal, be it a hurricane or flood or hearth or warfare and even, apparently, a haunted home, really feel considerably related to these who’ve skilled the identical fearful occasion alongside them.
Our worry can deliver us collectively. It could actually additionally tear us aside.
Halloween offers the language to speak about threats, actual or imagined. “The zombies have arrived, and we’ve to determine how one can navigate round them,” a citizen of a Vermont city was not too long ago quoted as saying. She was speaking about homeless individuals.
‘Treachery, Rage and black Concern’
It’s each straightforward and useful to personify worry as one thing outdoors of us – to provide it, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “a neighborhood habitation and a reputation.”
Concern looms and fades; visits at evening; thrives in sure situations. In his epic “The Aeneid,” the Roman poet Virgil describes the warfare god, Mars, as accompanied by his posse: “the god’s retainers – Treachery, Rage, and black Concern – pound beside him.”
This nightmare troika has a recent ring. If by treachery we perceive traps, tips, ambushes, we will plug in political debate, rife with accusations of lying; tips and rage additionally characterize a great deal of public discourse. And isn’t anger the other facet of the coin of worry?
Virgil, an excellent psychologist of many sorts of unease, additionally depicts a much less aggressive manifestation of worry: “Up on the wall stood frightened moms, gazing/After the mud cloud and the bronze-bright squadrons.” Uneasy spectators, helpless to guard their family members, they watch their sons marching to warfare. In the same passage, “moms, the unarmed commons,/And weak outdated males got here pouring out to fill/Towers and roofs.”
These of us not on a battlefield are ready of tense watching and ready.
We really feel powerless to have an effect on the result; the stakes are excessive; we worry the worst.
‘Turnus over the our bodies of Almo and Galaesus’ Duncan 1890 through Getty Photos
Love and heroism in brief provide
Concern is linked to like. In Homer’s “Iliad,” Achilles is reluctant to struggle for the Greek facet not as a result of he’s afraid of dying, although he is aware of his life could also be brief. Slightly, he’s too indignant to sacrifice his life for a trigger and commanders he not believes in – till his beloved Patroklos is killed by Hector. Solely then do Achilles’ temper and motivation change; he eagerly rejoins the struggle.
Characters in Greek tragedies could make horrible choices, be topic to insanity, destroy themselves and others – however they’re hardly ever afraid. The worry and pity Aristotle ascribes to tragedy are the feelings of the spectator.
In reference to worry, one of many solely characters in Greek tragedy who readily involves thoughts is Admetus, the husband of Alcestis in Euripides’ play of that identify. Knowledgeable that he’s fated to die, Admetus scrambles frantically for a substitute to die in his place. His personal father huffily refuses, however his spouse Alcestis volunteers.
When on the finish of the play a veiled, silent determine we presume to be Alcestis reappears, there’s reduction, in addition to some nervous laughter. This play, with its – kind of – completely satisfied ending, seems to not be a tragedy in any case. It’s nearer to darkish comedy.
In our personal time, somewhat than worry of dying, worry of loss looms massive – worry of isolation, humiliation, standing; worry of poverty; worry of change. Elsewhere in “the Aeneid,” a personality within the underworld makes a resonant comment concerning the afterlife: “Every bears his personal ghosts.”
Possibly every of us has our personal taste of worry. There’s not a lot love or heroism in proof these Halloween and preelection days. Anger and treachery, worry’s companions, are on each day show.
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