Topical Guide 126
Mark Dorset
Anxiety for the Unknown; Anxiety for the Future
I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME, and in a watery haze I walked down the hall, away from the familiar, toward the unknown. I wasn’t crying, but there was a lump in my throat, my eyes were watering, and everything ahead of me was blurry, indistinct. I had closed the door of Room 218 behind me, but in a larger sense I had closed a larger door, and the echoes of its closing reverberated in the hazy corridor that lay ahead of me. I had closed the door on third grade, on a part of my childhood, forever. I was walking toward an uncertain future, and I couldn’t make out where I was going.
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
It was the fourth time she was sleeping in an unknown place. The first time had been the day she entered the convent, the second her arrival at Tostes, the third at Vaubyessard, the fourth here; and each of them had turned out to mark a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could turn out the same in different places, and since her life so far had been bad, maybe that which was to come would be better.
To walk out your front door as if you’ve just arrived from a foreign country; to discover the world in which you already live; to begin the day as if you’ve just gotten off the boat from Singapore and have never seen your own doormat or the people on the landing . . . —it is this that reveals the humanity before you, unknown till now.
Pierre Hamp, “La Littérature, image de la société” (Encyclopédie française, vol. 16, Arts et littératures dans la société contemporaine, 1, p. 64 (quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project)
“Our very passions, when most agitated, are most anticipative. Revenge, avarice, ambition, love, the desire of good and evil, are all fixed and pointed to some distant goal; to look backwards is like walking backwards—against our proper formation: the mind does not readily adopt the habit, and when once adopted, it will readily return to its natural bias. Oblivion is, therefore, a more easily obtained boon than we imagine. Forgetfulness of the past is purchased by increasing our anxiety for the future.”
Henry Pelham in Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham, or Adventures of a Gentleman
Fortune Cookie Wisdom
“I don’t know, Peter,” said Matthew. “We’re probably making a big mistake. Do you think they’d let us back into the third grade?”
“Aw, come on, Matthew,” I said. “We would have gone into the fourth grade eventually anyway. We might as well face up to it now. Besides, I don’t think they’ll let us go back—there was something about the way the door closed behind me—and the way it echoed in the hallway.”
Matthew stared at the floor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard that too.”Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
See also: Anxiety for the Future TG 30; Fortune Cookie Wisdom TG 37
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