Post

“The frightening things we do sometimes when we’re afraid to be afraid.” - Dr. Praetorius from ‘People Will Talk’ (J. Mankiewicz, 1951) I have a fear of heights. I don’t know when it arrived, but I didn’t always have it. I didn’t have it as a child. I didn’t have it in college. 1/13

But one day I was in a high rise building and noticed that I felt tremendous anxiety, panic even. Weirdly (and conveniently) this doesn’t apply to flying, which I can handle. Does that make sense? Not at all. Which is the point of this little essay: fear is not reasonable. 2/13

No matter how much I tried to convince myself that there was absolutely nothing for me to be fearful of… it wasn’t working. At a certain point I had to avert my eyes. 4/13

My rational faculties simply couldn’t overcome whatever was activating those far more ancient structures in my brain that were convinced that I was in mortal peril. 5/13

That’s not even the worst of it: I once experienced acrophobia when just READING about people at great heights: there’s a passage in Michael Chabon’s “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” that takes place on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. 6/13