Demons seem to surround us. The irony, though, is that we create these demons largely between our ears, often spawned by autogenerated fears, sometimes rooted in our problematic relations with the world. This theme is omnipresent, in tragic plays, violence-filled films, Trumpian politics…and books of all sorts. Think Odysseus and the Cyclops, Beowulf and Grendel.
My current half-read books are in stacks interspersed with piles of journal papers more-or-less organized according to on-going projects. These stacks and piles bespeak multiple concurrent threads of thought that occasionally coalesce in an urge to say something coherent, typically triggered by a catalytic experience. Which then leads to recollections of other previously-read but topically relevant books ranged on ceiling-high bookshelves which end up in additional stacks. In the end, the desired semi-coherence typically emerges only after the gestation of long solitary walks.
One door-stopper that has come to be a thematic through-thread for me is a book by Ervin Yalom entitled Existential Psychotherapy. Yalom draws on the tenets of existentialism to posit the existence of four enduring human anxieties, even terrors, related to confronting death, overcoming isolation, ascribing responsibility, and making meaning out of a meaningless universe. All humans are perhaps beset by these concerns, managed well or managed poorly. Beneath it all, though, lurks inchoate terror, rarely perceived, typically denied, and…