FEAR
What is fear, this thing that lives in the pit of the stomach and can find no home? We think of it, of course, as fear of the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unknown. And yet our greatest fears are quite to the contrary: of the inevitable ‑‑ death, separation, loss, loneliness, the splotched and sullied patterns of texture.
This very moment, in fact, sitting before this strange machine with my fears ‑‑ of displacement, homelessness, loneliness, change ‑‑ and daring to name them, I already feel them diminish. And isn’t that, at its very heart, the core of this thing we call „writer’s block?“‑‑ the fear that the writer’s own fears, his previously nameless archipelago of dread and isolation, will lose its disparate voices, and ‑‑ in a speechless, impenetrable silence ‑‑ engulf him?
So we speak to our demons in order to frighten them far enough away from us to allow us to live. The place where they and we lock horns, too, has a name: life.