Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The File: The Gift Of Fear

[B]ecause my childhood became all about prediction, I learned to live in the future. I didn't feel things in the present because I wanted to be a moving target, gone to the future before any blow could really be felt. This ability to live in tomorrow or next year immunized me against the pain and hopelessness of the worst moments, but it also made me reckless about my own safety. Recklessness and bravado are features of many violent people. [...]

As a child, I was left with the pastimes that cross time: worrying and predicting. I could see a vision of the future better than most people because the present did not distract me. This single-mindedness is another characteristic common to many criminals. Even things that would frighten most people could not distract me as a boy, for I had become so familiar with danger that it no longer caused alarm. Just as a surgeon loses his aversion to gore, so does the violent criminal. You can spot this feature in people who do not react as you might to shocking things. When everyone else who just witnessed a hostile argument is shaken up, for example, this person is calm.
-- Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, pp. 51

1:38:01 PM    comment []

The File: Weird And Tragic Shores

During the two-week crossing [Charles Francis Hall] came again under the spell of the maritime Arctic. He was awed, as so many other explorers have been, by the strange and often beautiful optical illusions created by refraction in northern seas. Mountains appeared and disappeared on the horizon; the sun, surrounded by a corona, was duplicated so that there were two suns and two coronas; the moon rose swollen to immense size and distorted into strange shapes; indescribable forms moved with miraculous fluidity between water and sky. As usual, Hall thought of God:

A thousand youthful forms of the fairest outline seemed to be dancing to and fro, their white arms intertwined--bodies incessantly varying, intermixing, falling, rising, jumping, skipping, hopping, whirling, waltzing, resting, and again rushing to the mazy dance--never tired--ever playful--ever light and airy, graceful and soft to the eye. Who could view such wondrous scenes of divine enchantment and not exclaim, "O Lord, how manifest are thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches!"
-- Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer, pp. 77

1:29:33 PM    comment []