Of Fear

The thing that I fear the most is fear itself. In gravity and penetration it exceeds all other accidents. What passion is there that could be more violent, or more unmanly, than this? It can so discompose and bereave a man of his senses that he neither speaks, nor hears, nor knows what he does. Death itself is not so terrible as the approach of death when fear attaches itself to that approach. A man who has gone calmly to execution has died better than a man who spent three months dying of fright at the prospect.

There are countless examples of men made temporarily insane by fear — men who have thrown themselves off cliffs, stabbed their companions, confessed to things they never did — all under the influence of a terror that the object of it would not, by itself, have warranted. Fear is not proportional to danger. It is proportional to the imagination, which is a far less reliable measure. A man can be more afraid of a shadow than of a sword.

“Fear sometimes gives wings to the heels and sometimes nails them to the ground; it sometimes forces a man to fly when there is no cause, and at others freezes him in place when flight would save him.”

I have felt fear myself — not the heroic kind that men describe, the clarifying fear of the battlefield, but the duller, more persistent kind that visits in the night without occasion. It is a poor companion. It offers nothing useful: no information, no plan, no comfort. It only occupies the space where reason might otherwise be sitting.

The most frightening thing about fear, in the end, is not what it makes us do but what it makes us into. A man acting out of fear is not himself — he is the shadow that fear has cast of him. Whatever he does in that condition, he cannot properly be said to have done. This is why we ought to resist it with such particular care: not because courage is an ornament, but because fear is a kind of temporary erasure of the self.