Brooding in their cells, medieval monks identified a malaise they called accidie – not acid indigestion of the soul, but an apathetic and self-disgusted inertia. It overtook them in the static afternoons, so they called it “the noonday demon”. Francis O’Gorman has a bogey of his own, which attacks him in the middle of the night, and his book about anxiety begins at 4.06 am as he works through scenarios of imaginary disaster provoked by his uncertainty about whether he has locked the back door of his house. We have all been there; some of us spend a few hours there every night, watching a digital clock indifferently bat its eyelid as we wait for the bleary dawn to brighten the sky and wipe away our panic.
A monastic worrier in the fourth century, Evagrius the Solitary, said that accidie’s symptoms included “a hatred of manual labour”. O’Gorman – who is a literature professor, and as such a remote descendant of socially marginal self-flagellators like Evagrius – here sets himself a brisk therapeutic task by writing a book that attempts to cure or at least comprehend his misery. He alleviates his problem by sharing it with the rest of us: we are all, he claims, the victims of a metaphysical calamity. We worry because we no longer believe in the gods who used to control our destinies; responsible for ourselves, we are obliged to make existential choices that ought to propel us ahead but more often leave us feeling dejected, disappointed, wondering what we did wrong.
O’Gorman’s little treatise inserts itself into a crevice “between the psychological and the theological”. It reads like a monologue overheard in the confessional box, although O’Gorman has no priest to prescribe penalties and absolve him. On the contrary, listening to his blurted self-accusations, he is forced to recognise that his mind is not a rational machine but an irrational menace. The noonday demon now works round the clock, and turns us back into superstitious cave dwellers, terrified by the dark.
After that first spasm of quaking terror when he confronts “the unconsoled ridiculousness of human life”, O’Gorman keeps himself busy by airily theorising. He spends much of the book picking apart the recommendations of assorted quacks and healers. Early self-help volumes preach the virtue of “positive thinking”, or blithely argue that “faith-thought” has the capacity to drive out “fear-thought”. The psychotherapist Charles Rycroft proposes that low-level worry has “an evolutionary function”, somehow inoculating us against a decline into insanity. Another guru thinks that clinical depression has value as a reality check, “a reminder of what is important in human life”. Are those who slump into this condition really likely to be grateful because “depression reveals who you are”?
Etymologically, worry began as a physical struggle, a choking or strangulation: we still speak of dogs worrying bones. Problems began when the word changed from a verb to a noun, which allowed worry to quit the body and slip into the mind. There it creates unease by goading us to speculate about things that may never happen, or that will happen whether we fuss about them or not. Worry, as O’Gorman, says, specialises in asking the open-ended question “What if…?” What if we don’t hear the alarm, miss the train, don’t get to the interview, fail to get the job? All these prospects are conditional, but they’re not conditional on our worrying about them. To be paralysed by dread of the future is like the schoolboy’s excuse in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: he doesn’t do his homework, he explains, “because the universe is expanding and, well, some day, everything will fall apart”. Indeed it will, but meanwhile we need to keep going. Better to live in the moment or day by day than to anticipate an apocalypse none of us will witness.
O’Gorman is at his most cogent when he abandons the guilt-ridden qualms of theology and the quick fixes of psychiatry in order to consider worry as a social and economic malady, the toxic fallout from “the failure of the liberal dream”. We have been infected, he claims, by Americanitis, having allowed ourselves to be persuaded that life is about liberty, which in turn – according to the skewed definition in the Declaration of Independence – means the pursuit of happiness.
At least the sages of 1776 merely urged us to pursue happiness, and made no promise that we would attain it; they certainly never imagined that the pursuit would take place in shopping malls. Now, however, we’re convinced “that we have politically and morally some form of right to have our individual desires fulfilled”.
Consumer capitalism is supposed to deliver this instant and total satisfaction. Instead it leaves us bloated but famished; freedom, interpreted as customer choice, has turned, O’Gorman doomily says, into “a species of coercion”. Beware any display of gem-hard, ice-white American teeth, especially if their owner is telling you to have a nice day. The message of all that dental work, as Barbara Ehrenreich sums it up, is “smile or die”, and its purpose is to prevent us from worrying about political and social messes we may have the power to amend.
Despite this bracing clarity, O’Gorman continues to toss in his insomniac bed, easy prey for the demon. “I’m going to get this wrong,” he says at the outset, which does not give the reader confidence in him. His book goes on to gnaw at itself, demonstrating that “it’s possible to worry about worrying”. “Worry is usually circular,” he laments. To prove the point, his argument revolves in trapped circles or implodes into tautology: at his most fidgety, he counts the number of times he has used the term in the first few pages, and comes up with the leaden total of 162.
Ultimately O’Gorman concludes that “word art” – is this academic jargon for the literature he teaches? – can offer the worrier no help. He therefore attunes his unsteady head to Bach’s nonverbal counterpoint, which replaces fretfulness with harmony. Yet music is no guarantee of tranquillity, unless you use it as a brain-emptying sedative. The demon can speak in notes as well as words: in the opening bars of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, music worries itself to a standstill and lapses into the sonic equivalent of a nervous breakdown – though of course it recovers, as most of us do. I’d advise O’Gorman to cheer up. True, life can be grim and gloomy; I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that non-existence might be worse.
Worrying is published by Bloomsbury Academic (£14). Click here to buy it with free UK p&p
