was a flash of a white shoe and something red and the closing of the sighing swing doors that led out of the reading room onto the stairs.
Now that the restless time-waster had left, I transferred my irritation to the management. The building was notorious for its noise, above all the buzzing fluorescent lighting in the stacks, which no one could fix. Perhaps I’d be happier at the Wellcome library. The science collection here was laughable. The assumption appeared to be that theworld could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories, and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilization?
This inner rant may have lasted for as long as two minutes. I was enclosed by it, invisible to myself. I came to by the simple assertion of a self-consciousness that even Mr.—— could not have claimed for his friend’s dog. It was, of course, not a squeaking floorboard or the library management that agitated me. It was my emotional condition, the mental-visceral state I had yet to understand. I sat back in my chair and gathered my notes. At that stage I still had not grasped the promptings of footwear and color. I stared at the page on my lap. The last words I had written before losing control of my thoughts had been “intentionality, intention, tries to assert control over the future.” These words referred to a dog when I wrote them, but rereading them now, I began to fret. I couldn’t find the word for what I felt. Unclean, contaminated, crazy, physical but somehow moral. It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word. As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. Anxiety about, distaste for the future. Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from past to future, pivoting in the present—the only moment it could be experienced. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Fear was too focused, it had an object. Dread was too strong. Fear of the future. Apprehension, then. Yes, there it was, approximately. It was apprehension.
In front of me the three sleepers did not stir. The swing doors had moved in diminishing pendulum movement, and now there was nothing but molecular reverberation, one step up from the imaginary. Who was the person who had just left? Why so suddenly? I stood up. It was apprehension, then. All day long I had been in this state. It wassimple, it was a form of fear. A fear of outcomes. All day I’d been afraid. Was I so obtuse, not to know fear from the start? Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger, and elation, in Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study? Was not fear and the recognition of it in others associated with neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains, from where it fired its instant responses? But my own response had not been instant. My fear had held a mask to its face. Pollution, confusion, gabbling. I was afraid of my fear, because I did not yet know the cause. I was scared of what it would do to me and what it would make me do. And I could not stop looking at the door.
It may have been an illusion caused by visual persistence, or a neurally tripped delay of perception, but it seemed to me that I was still slumped in my smooth leather chair staring at that door even while I was moving toward it. I took the broad red carpeted stairs two at a time, swung myself on the newel post round the half-landing, took the final flight in three strides, and burst into the clerkly, predigital calm of the booking and catalogue hall. I dodged past fellow members, past the suggestion book and the schoolboyish tangle of satchels and coats, through the main door, and out into the street. St. James’s
Now that the restless time-waster had left, I transferred my irritation to the management. The building was notorious for its noise, above all the buzzing fluorescent lighting in the stacks, which no one could fix. Perhaps I’d be happier at the Wellcome library. The science collection here was laughable. The assumption appeared to be that theworld could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories, and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilization?
This inner rant may have lasted for as long as two minutes. I was enclosed by it, invisible to myself. I came to by the simple assertion of a self-consciousness that even Mr.—— could not have claimed for his friend’s dog. It was, of course, not a squeaking floorboard or the library management that agitated me. It was my emotional condition, the mental-visceral state I had yet to understand. I sat back in my chair and gathered my notes. At that stage I still had not grasped the promptings of footwear and color. I stared at the page on my lap. The last words I had written before losing control of my thoughts had been “intentionality, intention, tries to assert control over the future.” These words referred to a dog when I wrote them, but rereading them now, I began to fret. I couldn’t find the word for what I felt. Unclean, contaminated, crazy, physical but somehow moral. It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word. As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. Anxiety about, distaste for the future. Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from past to future, pivoting in the present—the only moment it could be experienced. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Fear was too focused, it had an object. Dread was too strong. Fear of the future. Apprehension, then. Yes, there it was, approximately. It was apprehension.
In front of me the three sleepers did not stir. The swing doors had moved in diminishing pendulum movement, and now there was nothing but molecular reverberation, one step up from the imaginary. Who was the person who had just left? Why so suddenly? I stood up. It was apprehension, then. All day long I had been in this state. It wassimple, it was a form of fear. A fear of outcomes. All day I’d been afraid. Was I so obtuse, not to know fear from the start? Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger, and elation, in Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study? Was not fear and the recognition of it in others associated with neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains, from where it fired its instant responses? But my own response had not been instant. My fear had held a mask to its face. Pollution, confusion, gabbling. I was afraid of my fear, because I did not yet know the cause. I was scared of what it would do to me and what it would make me do. And I could not stop looking at the door.
It may have been an illusion caused by visual persistence, or a neurally tripped delay of perception, but it seemed to me that I was still slumped in my smooth leather chair staring at that door even while I was moving toward it. I took the broad red carpeted stairs two at a time, swung myself on the newel post round the half-landing, took the final flight in three strides, and burst into the clerkly, predigital calm of the booking and catalogue hall. I dodged past fellow members, past the suggestion book and the schoolboyish tangle of satchels and coats, through the main door, and out into the street. St. James’s
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