July 4, 2013
The Fear of Death He was so frugal he would save even a bent paper clip. It was driven at its root by fear, that was of course obvious. You would have expected it was the type of fear one couldn’t articulate. An inchoate fear, slipping the mind like a loved one’s scent lingering just beyond sense in a room they’d long left. But in fact it was a very precise fear: the fear of waste, of coming to some calamity in his life and having been profligate. Profligate, and therefore blameworthy: responsible by his own malfeasance for the disaster’s incarnation. What wasting a bent paper clip had to do with this, what sort of problem it could possibly precipitate, he really couldn’t say, but this was how he felt. Ultimately, the fear of smaller catastrophes was an imperfectly confronted fear of death, either his or a loved one’s. Fears of lesser disasters were just echoes of this ur-fear...