Containing much to exercise the reader’s thoughts upon the questions of Fear and Sanity
Because memory makes it possible for us to dwell on our past mistakes and traumas, consolidating our ideas about what might do us harm, it plays a role in conditioning our fears. This is its dark side, the counterpart of its being ‘the purveyor of reason’. Yet while such a sense of memory’s ambivalence is common, Sam also – and more unusually – finds grounds for thinking in much the same way about fear. There is more than a hint of this in his Dictionary entry for the word, where he quotes a sermon by John Rogers, a preacher popular in the 1720s: ‘Fear . . . is that passion of our nature whereby we are excited to provide for our security.’ It’s an unexpected choice of illustration, indicative of Sam’s belief that fear has its uses.
Today, if we think about the utility of fear, we are likely to picture the kinds of people who profit from increasing society’s anxieties: religious leaders, psychiatrists and the suppliers of faintly palliative therapies, pharma companies selling sedative drugs, providers of security services and equipment, journalists who suppose that intensifying readers’ fretfulness is a means of making their reports and commentary seem vital. We know, too, that fear can be an effective political tool, an instrument of oppression and coercion, used by many leaders to manipulate their people, who live in terror of brutal physical and mental abuse, although now we are more likely to think of the fear-inducing tactics of terrorists, who exploit the media’s appetite for the sensational in order to gain maximum attention and heighten our sense of risk and vulnerability.
Yet fear can also perform a very different function – as an instrument of self-control, keeping our coarser urges at bay and obliging us to think of the consequences of what we do. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud distinguishes between two different kinds of fear. One is ‘objective’, ‘a reaction to the perception of external danger’ that expresses our instinct for self-preservation. The other is what he calls ‘neurotic’ fear, ‘a general apprehensiveness . . . a “free-floating” anxiety . . . ready to attach itself to any thought which is at all appropriate, affecting judgements, inducing expectations, lying in wait for any opportunity to find a justification for itself’. Whereas neurotic fear is a handicap, objective fear is purposeful. It consists of alertness, a knowledge of danger’s sources and harbingers, an awareness of the limits of our power, and may be useful to explorers or, say, prison inmates. It proves powerful but not ungovernable, for ‘when dread is excessive it becomes in the highest degree inexpedient; it paralyses every action, even that of flight’.1
In the Rambler, Sam observes that there is widespread contempt for fear – for fearfulness itself, and for those who suffer from it. Yet no one is immune from its clutch: ‘Fear is a passion which every man feels . . . frequently predominant in his own breast.’ At root, ‘Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil’, and its role ‘is not to overbear reason, but to assist it’. This chimes with the view of the historian Joanna Bourke, who in her book Fear: A Cultural History describes how it can ‘stimulate attention, sharpen judgement and energize combatants’. She cites advertising campaigns that play on our fear of death to discourage smoking and drink-driving, and argues that fear has played an important part in civilizing us, causing us to be more reflective and stimulating creativity (because we dread loneliness or being struck down in our prime). Bourke’s conclusion that ‘A world without fear would be a dull world indeed’ differs from Sam’s, but both understand fear as a response to those features of the world that make it interesting.2
Fear is not, of course, the same as worry, though it is common to narrow the gap between them. One is involuntary, the other a choice. Fear is electrifying, worry wearisome. Yet we tend to deny that our worries are manufactured. Many of us also treat worries as if they’re a form of protection: to worry about something is to prevent its happening. Sam defined the verb to worry as ‘To tear, or mangle, as a beast tears its prey’ and ‘To harass, or persecute brutally’. It is something done to others; he gives the examples of wolves worrying sheep and heathens using dogs to worry the Christians they wished to persecute. Only in the nineteenth century did worry start to be something self-inflicted, a state of anxious inner debate, a kind of literary criticism of the self in which the nuances of the ordinary are scrupulously parsed.
We worry about things, not of or on them, though we can worry away at an issue. The gesture here is fidgety and oblique rather than direct: instead of stepping decisively into view, worry encroaches, making the feelings that preceded the worry shrivel up. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that worries ‘can be punishments for wishes, or wishes cast in persecutory form’; when we worry, we regret desires and reject our dreams, and our sense of life’s potential narrows. ‘All of us may be surrealists in our dreams,’ notes Phillips, ‘but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois.’3 We worry about not having enough money, our status at work, how attractive we are, whether there’ll be enough room in the suitcase for the vast number of things we need to take on a trip. All of which is prosaic. If I asked you to say what colour worries are, I’m guessing you’d say grey rather than purple. The grey army of worries, not so much soldier-like as bureaucratic, swarms around our plans and hopes and ideas, penning them in, causing them to starve.
Fear, on the other hand, is a response to an immediate threat, and the colour with which we’re most likely to associate it is red – the red of warning, danger, anger, fire, blood and power. Yet for his first illustration of the word in the Dictionary, Sam chooses an extract from John Locke that doesn’t evoke such a keen sense of scarlet passion or flaming hazard: ‘Fear is an uneasiness of the mind, upon the thought of future evil likely to befall us.’ To a modern reader this sounds more like anxiety (which the Dictionary defines as ‘Trouble of mind about some future event’), and Sam does not in fact distinguish clearly between fear and anxiety. But the quotation from Locke appeals to him because of the word ‘uneasiness’: though for us perhaps not very evocative, it makes him think of pain, disturbance, constraint and even cramping. Although Locke is referring to something that happens in the mind, ‘uneasiness’ captures some of the ways in which fear expresses itself through the body. ‘All fear is in itself painful,’ Sam argues in the Rambler. In one of his Idler essays he writes of how fear ‘is received by the ear as well as the eyes’ and can ‘chill’ the breast of a warrior, and in another he imagines a traveller who ‘in the dusk fears more as he sees less’ and ‘shrinks at every noise’. These are a few examples among many. Again and again he pictures fear as something invasive, nagging, goading, physically oppressive – a state that takes control of both mind and body.
There was nothing that Sam feared more than insanity, which seemed proximate and hideous, and it was this that caused him to subdue his imagination, denying certain urges full access to his consciousness. In Rasselas, the philosopher Imlac speaks about what he terms the ‘dangerous prevalence of the imagination’ and refers to the need to ‘repress’ the ‘power of fancy’. This choice of verb again brings to mind Freud, who wrote about the ego’s rejection or censorship of ‘unwelcome’ impulses. Imlac is not identical with his creator and, unlike Freud, thinks of repression as straightforwardly beneficial, but the image is still an arresting one. Sam’s other observations on the matter foreshadow Freud’s notions about the mind’s hinterland. Even if the language only a few times prefigures Freud’s (in one of his sermons he refers to ‘the repression of . . . unreasonable desires’), the connection deserves notice. In Rambler 29 he describes how anxiety fills the mind with ‘perpetual stratagems of counteraction’ – psychological defence mechanisms, like the ones Freud later identified. An especially potent statement on this theme comes in Rambler 76, where he observes that ‘No man yet was ever wicked without secret discontent’; the last two words evoke the whole drama of muffled desire and neurosis. One of the most astute interpreters of Johnson’s thought, Walter Jackson Bate, identifies his ‘studied and sympathetic sense of the way in which the human imagination, when it is blocked in its search for satisfaction, doubles back . . . or skips out diagonally in some form of projection’. This, he argues, is probably ‘the closest anticipation of Freud . . . before the twentieth century’.4
As he thought about the dangers of losing his mind, Sam sometimes pictured the poet Christopher Smart, sent to a madhouse in Bethnal Green at the insistence of his father-in-law John Newbery (Sam’s sometime publisher). Smart was a whirlwind of religious fervour, frequently unstable, but to Sam he seemed a cautionary figure. Had he been locked up for his own good or for other people’s convenience? At his lowest ebb, Smart could still claim that ‘I am not without authority in my jeopardy’, but his confinement denied him both his privacy – tourists came and gawped at him – and his access to public life and recognition. Sam saw how grotesque this was: ‘I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society . . . Another charge was that he did not love clean linen – and I have no passion for it.’ Those final words, replete with self-knowledge, invite laughter. But the possibility of being detained on grounds similar to Smart’s was real and appalling.
Hester Thrale spoke of Sam’s ‘particular attention to the diseases of the imagination’, and his understanding of that faculty was certainly complex. He believed in the power of the imaginary to activate our empathy, and, even though he tended to claim that the more inventive sorts of fiction were puerile and ‘too remote from known life’, he could revel in stories of adventure and romance. In his life of Milton, he proposed that ‘Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.’ But the imagination could breed despair and shameful wishes – not the least of which was the urge to masturbate – as well as the overripe daydreams that he called ‘this secret prodigality of being’ and likened to ‘the poison of opiates’. In Rasselas, Imlac voices the thoroughly Johnsonian anxiety that a solitary person can become fixated with a single idea and will feast on ‘luscious falsehood’ whenever ‘offended with the bitterness of truth’. Indulging the imagination creates the impression of deliciously concentrated flavours, but it is only that – an impression. The result is a treacherous sense of the world’s insufficiency.
At its best, then, imagination is a passport to enlightenment, and at its worst a route into madness. Sam thinks of it as a person, often ‘licentious and vagrant’ and capable of what he calls ‘seducements’ – yet with the potential to be ‘bright and active’ and to ‘animate’ one’s knowledge. It can also be a cancer, ‘a formidable and obstinate disease of the intellect’ which ‘preys incessantly upon life’; a vessel, which it is natural to keep trying to fill; a muscle, easily strained; or an appliance that overheats when charged with the ‘blaze of hope’ and needs cooling down with a dose of realism.
The double-edged nature of imagination means that the mind is in a state of perpetual turbulence. Sam writes in Rambler 8 of the need to ‘govern our thoughts, restrain them from irregular motions’, and in Rambler 125 of imagination’s tendency to ‘burst the enclosures of regularity’. But how to achieve regularity? He searched for means of keeping imagination under control, and in later years one of these consisted of carrying out small experiments. For instance, he shaved the hair on his arms, curious to see how long it took to grow back, and kept track of the weight of forty-one leaves he had cut from a vine and laid out to dry on his bookshelves. His interest in such matters chimed with a broader interest in science, but was a means of grounding himself, attaching his thoughts to exact details of reality when otherwise they might float off into fancy – or proliferate into frenzy.
In his diaries, Sam echoes the cries of Shakespeare’s Lear – ‘Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.’ He did not subscribe to the view, which has since been periodically fashionable, that madness is a form of protest or some kind of higher authenticity, an instinct for the poetic or an alertness to hidden truths. ‘Reason is the great distinction of human nature’, he wrote in Rambler 162, and in Rambler 137 he emphasized its capacity to ‘disentangle complications and investigate causes’. In his view, whatever interfered with the powers of reason was dangerous, and insanity seemed always to be encroaching on them. But those powers often seemed most acute when he believed he was teetering on the brink of insanity; attending to their functions was a way to stop himself disintegrating.
His notion of reason was heavily influenced by his reading of Locke, who identified what he called ‘the wrong connection in our minds of ideas’ as a ‘great force to set us awry’. In the Dictionary Sam cited Locke in his entry for madness: ‘There are degrees of madness as of folly, the disorderly jumbling ideas together.’ False associations can crystallize fanaticism and prejudice, and they have a tendency to persist stubbornly. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke gave the example of a young man who learns to dance in a room that contains an old trunk: he is able to dance only in the presence of this trunk, and being unable to dance in a public place (at least without lugging a trunk around) is a social handicap, perhaps not tragic but certainly insidious. Sam believed that by inspecting his thought processes he could identify and undo crippling associations of this kind.
But this was something to be done in private, when alone. He reserved commentary on his precarious state of mind for his diaries, or for discussion with his most intimate friends; in public, and especially in his published writings, he made a point of maintaining an impression of mental equilibrium. Though revealingly quick to express sympathy for people whose minds were in distress, he translated his own painful experiences of what he called the ‘invisible riot of the mind’ into wisdom. When he discussed with Boswell how to deal with upsetting thoughts, he was clear that diversion was the best remedy. Boswell wondered if it wasn’t possible to combat them through the direct application of one’s intelligence, and Sam replied, ‘To attempt to think them down is madness.’ Introspection is not its own cure.
At the same time, he wondered whether sanity was a substantive quality. The concept seemed vague – and still does. In his book Going Sane (2005), Adam Phillips writes that ‘The language of mental health . . . comes to life . . . in descriptions of disability, incompetence and failure’, whereas ‘the rules of sanity that are being broken are never properly codified, or even articulated’. It is as though we think that ‘if we look after the madness the sanity will take care of itself’. Maybe, in truth, we are ‘unaccustomed to valuing things, to exploring things, that are not traumatic’, and sanity ‘has been invented as some fictitious vantage point from which the trauma that is madness can be observed’. The language of sanity is ‘like propaganda for a world . . . that has never existed’.5
In the Dictionary, Sam defines sanity as ‘soundness of mind’. The sole quotation he uses to illustrate this is from Hamlet, in which Polonius speaks of ‘A happiness that often madness hits on, / Which sanity and reason could not be / So prosp’rously delivered of.’ Polonius is referring to Hamlet’s ‘pregnant’ utterances, full of wit and wordplay. It’s an interesting choice of illustration, since it values madness rather than sanity. If we turn to the entry for mad, there are personal notes in Sam’s defining it as ‘delirious without fever’, ‘broken in the understanding’ and ‘overrun with any violent or unreasonable desire’. Under madness he cites Locke’s statement that ‘There are degrees of madness as of folly’ – a view he certainly endorsed, though his contemporaries tended to disagree. The sole illustrative quotation for madhouse comes from a seventeenth-century collection of fables – in which an inmate in such a place explains that ‘the mad folks abroad are too many for us, and so they have mastered all the sober people and cooped them up here’.
‘Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.’ So says Imlac, arguing that any moment when fancy gets the upper hand over reason is tinged with insanity. While it isn’t safe to assume that a quotation from Rasselas represents Sam’s views, Imlac is the closest thing in it to his mouthpiece, and the spirit of his creator is audible in this suggestion that we are all susceptible to inexplicable compulsions and the darker urgings of the unconscious. Humankind is fallible; even the most sublime mind will err, and all of us from time to time lose contact with our better judgement. In this view, which looks ahead to ideas developed in the twentieth century by such scholars of madness as Michel Foucault, unreason is simply one of the places that the strange pilgrimage of life takes us.
On his fifty-first birthday, Sam vowed to ‘reclaim imagination’, and the verb naturally makes one think about what it’s being reclaimed from: benightedness, desire (he says that ‘Every desire is a viper in the bosom’), thoughts of suicide perhaps, and twisted fantasy. It’s worth noticing, too, that the verb reclaim was originally, in the fourteenth century, used of a hawk, and in Sam’s time continued to be used in this way. The imagination, like the hawk, can glide gracefully, but there are moments when it slips beyond one’s reach, when its violence and the drama of its flight can obliterate all other sensations. Here I’m reminded of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, a memoir in which training a hawk is a means of dealing with grief. ‘Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human,’ writes Macdonald. ‘Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future.’6 For Sam, it’s essential to rein the imagination back in before it can take him past the edge of being a human – past it, over it, into the abyss.
An element of his heroism was a willingness to pay attention to any and every thought he had, no matter how unpleasant or painful. His choosing to look inside himself in this way feels unexpectedly modern, as does his urging the habit upon others. ‘Make your boy tell you his dreams,’ he instructed Hester Thrale, explaining that ‘the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream’. He would not tell her what this was, but clearly he had reflected on it, probing the source of a dark thought. Dreams seemed a particularly disquieting example of imagination’s tyranny, continuing by stealth the mind’s diurnal work, compensating for the steady hand of rationality, or dramatizing those conflicts and connections that lay low in his waking life. When he describes a dream as ‘a phantasm of sleep’ (his Dictionary definition) or ‘a temporary recession from the realities of life’ (in the Idler), he captures their fantastical quality and hints at their purpose: as a form of review, a solution to problems that under one’s waking scrutiny seem insoluble, a means of correcting misperceptions or fulfilling socially unacceptable urges, a detox programme, and a repository for messages from the future.