What fear can teach us Karen Thompson Walker

one day in 1819 3,000 miles off the

coast of Chile in one of the most remote

regions of the Pacific Ocean 20 American

sailors watched their ship flood with

seawater

they’d been struck by a sperm whale

which had ripped a catastrophic hole in

the ship’s hull as their ship began to

sink beneath the swells the men huddled

together in three small whale boats

these men were 10,000 miles from home in

more than a thousand miles from the

nearest scrap of land in their small

boats they carried only rudimentary

navigational equipment and limited

supplies of food and water these were

the men of the whaleship Essex whose

story would later inspire parts of Moby

Dick even in today’s world their

situation would be really dire but think

about how much worse it would have been

then no one on lands had any idea that

anything had gone wrong no search party

was coming to look for these men so most

of us have never experienced a situation

as frightening as the one in which these

sailors found themselves but we all know

what it’s like to be afraid we know how

fear feels but I’m not sure we spend

enough time thinking about what our

fears mean as we grow up we’re often

encouraged to think of fear as a

weakness

just another childish thing to discard

like baby teeth or roller skates and I

think it’s no accident that we think

this way neuroscientists have actually

shown that human beings are hard-wired

to be optimists so maybe that’s why we

think of fear sometimes as a danger in

and of itself don’t worry we like to say

to one another don’t panic in English

fear is something we conquer it’s

something we fight something we overcome

but what if we looked at fear in a fresh

way what if we thought of fear as an

amazing act of the imagination something

that can be as profound and insightful a

story telling itself it’s easiest to see

this link between fear and the

imagination and young children whose

fears are often extraordinarily vivid

when I was a child I lived in California

which is you know mostly a very nice

place to live but if for me as a child

California could also be a little scary

I remember how how frightening it was to

see the chandelier that huh

dining table swing back and forth during

every minor earthquake and I sometimes

couldn’t sleep at night terrified and

that the big one might strike while we

were sleeping

and what we sing about kids who have

fears like that is it that they have a

vivid imagination but at a certain point

most of us learn to leave these kinds of

visions behind and grow up we learned

that there are no monsters hiding under

the bed and not every earthquake brings

buildings down but maybe it’s no

coincidence that some of our most

creative minds fail to leave these kinds

of fears behind as adults the same

incredible imaginations that produced

the Origin of Species Jane Eyre the

remembrance of things past also

generated intense worries that haunted

the adult lives of Charles Darwin

Charlotte Bronte and Marcel Proust so

the question is what can the rest of us

learn about fear from visionaries and

young children

well let’s return to the Year 1819 for a

moment to the situation facing the crew

of the whaleship Essex let’s take a look

at the fears that their imaginations

were generating as they drifted in the

middle of the Pacific 24 hours have now

passed since the capsizing of the ship

the time had come for the men to make a

plan but they had very few options in

his fascinating account of the disaster

Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men

were just about as far from land as it

was possible to be anywhere on earth the

men knew that the nearest islands they

could reach were the marquessa Islands

1,200 miles away but they’d heard some

frightening rumors they’d been told that

these islands and several others nearby

were populated by cannibals so the men

pictured coming ashore only to be

murdered and eaten for dinner another

possible destination was Hawaii but

given the season the captain was afraid

they’d be struck by severe storms now

the last option was the longest and the

most difficult to sail 1,500 miles due

south in hopes of reaching a certain

band of winds that could eventually push

them toward the coast of South America

but they knew that the sheer length of

this journey would stretch their

supplies of food and water to be eaten

by cannibals to be battered by storms

to starve to death before reaching land

these were the fears that danced in the

imaginations of these poor men and as it

turned out the fear they chose to listen

to would govern whether they lived or

died now we might just as easily call

these fears by a different name what if

instead of calling them fears we called

them stories because that’s really what

fear is if you think about it it’s a

kind of unintentional storytelling that

we are all born knowing how to do and

fears and storytelling have the same

components they have the same

architecture like all stories fears have

characters in our fears the characters

are us fears also have plots they have

beginnings and middles and ends you

board the plane the plane takes off the

engine fails our fears also tend to

contain imagery that can be every bit as

vivid as what you might find in the

pages of a novel picture a cannibal

human teeth sinking into human skin

human flesh roasting over a fire

fears also have suspense if I’ve done my

job as a storyteller today you should be

wondering what happened to the men of

the whaleship Essex our fears provoked

in us a very similar form of suspense

just like all great stories our fears

focus our attention on a question that

is as important in life as it is in

literature what will happen next in

other words our fears make us think

about the future in humans by the way

are the only creatures capable of

thinking about the future in this way of

projecting ourselves forward in time and

this mental time travel is just one more

thing that fears have in common with

storytelling as a writer I can tell you

that a big part of writing fiction is

learning to predict how one event in a

story will affect all the other events

and fear works in that same way and fear

just like in fiction one thing always

leads to another when I was writing my

first novel the age of miracles I spent

months trying to figure out what would

happen if the rotation of the earth

suddenly began to slow down what would

happen to our days what would happen to

our crops what happened to our minds

and then it was only later that I

realized how very similar these

questions were to the ones I used to ask

myself as a child frightened in the

night if an earthquake strikes tonight I

used to worry what will happen to our

house what will happen to our to my

family and the answer to those questions

always took the form of a story so if we

think of our fears as more than just

fears but as stories we should think of

ourselves as the authors of those

stories but just as importantly we need

to think of ourselves as the readers of

our fears and how we choose to read our

fears can have a profound effect on our

lives now some of us naturally read our

fears more closely than others I read

about a study recently of successful

entrepreneurs and the author found that

these people shared a habit that he

called productive paranoia which meant

that these people instead of dismissing

their fears these people read them

closely they studied them and then they

translated that fear into preparation

and action so that way if their worst

fears came true their businesses were

ready and sometimes of course our worst

fears do come true that’s one of the

things that is so extraordinary about

fear once in a while our fears can

predict the future but we can’t possibly

prepare for all of the fears that our

imaginations concoct so how can we tell

the difference between the fears worth

listening to and all the others I think

the end of the story of the whaleship

Essex offers an illuminating if tragic

example after much deliberation the men

finally made a decision terrified of

cannibals they decided to forego the

closest islands and instead embarked on

the longer and much more difficult route

to South America after more than two

months at sea the men ran out of food as

they knew they might and they were still

quite far from lands when the last of

the survivors were finally picked up by

two passing ships less than half of the

men were left alive and some of them had

resorted to their own form of

cannibalism Herman Melville who used

this story as research for Moby Dick

wrote years later and from dry land

quote all the sufferings of these

miserable men of

ethics my in all human probability have

been avoided had they immediately after

leaving the wreck steered straight for

Tahiti but as Melville put it they

dreaded cannibals so the question is why

did these men dread cannibals so much

more than the extreme likelihood of

starvation

why were they swayed by one story so

much more than the other looked at from

this angle

there’s becomes a story about reading

the novelist glad ran a book off said

that the best reader has a combination

of two very different temperaments the

artistic and the scientific a good

reader has an artist’s passion a

willingness to get caught up in the

story but just as importantly the reader

also needs the coolness of judgment of a

scientist which acts to temper and

complicate the readers intuitive

reactions to the story as we’ve seen the

men of the Essex had no trouble with the

artistic part they dreamed up a variety

of horrifying scenarios the problem was

that they listened to the wrong story of

all the narratives their fears wrote

they responded only to the most lurid

the most vivid the one that was easiest

for their imaginations to picture

cannibals but perhaps if they’ve been

able to read their fears more like a

scientist with more coolness of judgment

they would have listened instead to the

less violent but the more likely tale

the story of starvation and headed for

Tahiti just as Melville’s sad commentary

suggests and maybe if we all tried to

read our fears we too would be less

often swayed by the most salacious among

them maybe then we’d spend less time

worrying about serial killers and plane

crashes and more time concerned with the

subtler and slower disasters we face the

silent build-up of plaque in our

arteries the gradual changes in our

climate just as the most nuanced stories

and literature are often the richest so

to my our subtlest fears be the truest

read in the right way our fears are an

amazing gift of the imagination

a kind of everyday of clairvoyance a way

of glimpsing what might be the future

when there’s still time to influence how

that future will play out

properly read our fears can offer us

something as precious as our favorite

works of literature a little wisdom a

bit of insight in a version of that most

elusive thing the truth thank you