What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth—of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked. I am more or less the same age Emily Dickinson was when she died. Here is what she thought: “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics!” The calm lunatic—now that is something to aspire to.

The most frightening time was my very early twenties. For a few years I was practically paralyzed.

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

From that fear emerged a disciplined desire for becoming.  That sounds stoic. It is instead closer to epicurean. Despite the discipline and deep desire I often failed, but was not often afraid.

I HAD a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till sudden I perceived it stir,—
It grew as I pursued,

Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.

Reading Ruefle I worry, a bit, that leaving fear behind I sacrificed a sensibility, a source of wisdom. To some I am naive, superficial, even silly in my willed-optimism.

A WOUNDED deer leaps highest,
I ’ve heard the hunter tell;
’T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You ’re hurt” exclaim!

I am wounded, even broken and bloody.  I still know the rush of fear.  But I choose, as I can, to step aside to see what comes behind or beside the fear.

Life is but life, and death but death!
Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath!
And if, indeed, I fail,
At least to know the worst is sweet.
Defeat means nothing but defeat,
No drearier can prevail!

Fear is a perception of emerging dread.  But what erupts from these cracks is seldom pure.  Rather good comes with bad, ugly and beautiful share the ride.  I choose, as I can, to welcome one and shun the other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When Brother André asks us to embrace suffering, is he saying, “If we knew the value of ignorance, we would ask for it?” Should we finally and willingly cease to understand? I have often said I would rather wonder than know. Is that a youthful stance, a Keatsian stance? Is that—could it be—negative capability? Should one mature beyond it? I don’t know. Rilke advises the young to “live the questions now,” because the answers can only be revealed in time, the extension of which they do not possess. Much like Keats himself says, in a letter, that certain lessons can only be learned on the touchstone of the heart, that is, through direct experience.

In his Letters to a Young Poet (number 4) Rilke wrote,

Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Love the questions, live the questions, have patience.  Alles zu leben: to live all, to fully, consciously, actively, positively, gently, and patiently embrace living.  This is much more than - very different from - embracing suffering.  Yes, suffering is one of the questions and some aspect of every life.  But to focus on suffering, on anxiety, on fear is an unnatural restriction of the horizon.

Keats died at an age when no one should have to die. I wonder if the young are less afraid of dying, or more afraid of dying, than the old. I am no longer young. I am old enough to understand and know that it is not death I am afraid of, it’s dying. Dying is the act, most often painful, that leads to death, while death itself is as painless as the feeling you had before you were born—no feeling at all, you didn’t care one way or another (feeling is caring one way or another). But what do I know? Blessed Brother André, currently under investigation for sainthood, said, “If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.” Though others can, I cannot fathom that remark, let alone embrace it. Nor am I a Buddhist, one who believes suffering is based on ignorance, and that ignorance can be eradicated; actually, I do believe that suffering is based on ignorance (if the Third Reich had not been ignorant, millions would not have had to perish), but I don’t believe ignorance can be eradicated. Actually, I do believe ignorance can be eradicated, but in the way of a weed—it will only pop up again someplace else.

In the current election campaign it is possible to perceive a contest between two kinds of fearing.

One campaign seems motivated by fear of fundamental change.  The other campaign is not opposed to change, but is afraid change is moving in the wrong direction.

In some ways each campaign has accurately discerned reality: The change we are experiencing is profound and beyond our control.

But in each case fear overestimates our power to undo or direct this change.  We are riding a flood.  With considerable effort we may be able to move vaguely left or awkwardly right, but the flood will take us where it chooses more than we choose.

The risks are real.  Our emotional responses will range widely and are, in any case, also beyond our control. But as Ruefle set out at the start, with cognition we determine what feelings will emerge from our emotion.

Exhilaration, excitement, expectation are, I perceive, more helpful than fear.

We do not know the etymology of the word fear. That is, the makers of dictionaries are unsure of it. But there is a good chance that it is related to the word fare in its oldest sense, which is to pass through, to go through, as in, How did you fare at the dentist’s? or Fare-thee-well or, He fared in this life like one whose name was writ in water.

Fear O.E. fær "danger, peril," from P.Gmc. *færa (cf. O.S. far "ambush," O.N. far "harm, distress, deception," Ger. Gefahr "danger"), from PIE base *per- "to try, risk, come over, go through" (perhaps connected with Gk. peira "trial, attempt, experience," L. periculum "trial, risk, danger"). Sense of "uneasiness caused by possible danger" developed late 12c. The verb is from O.E. færan "terrify, frighten," originally transitive (sense preserved in archaic I fear me). Sense of "feel fear" is late 14c. Related: Feared; fearing. O.E. words for "fear" as we now use it were ege, fyrhto; as a verb, ondrædan.

Earlier in this response to Ruefle I have referenced יָרֵא or yare, one of the twenty-six words translated as fear in the Hebrew Bible.

The oldest meaning of yare is to pour water or shoot a bow and arrow. Fear is the release of energy.

Released where, how, why?  We get to decide: where to pour the water, target of our arrow, the purpose to which our fear is unleashed.

When still a boy - 10 to 12 - I won archery contests.  What I recall most is the deep calm and quiet that enveloped me in taking aim and releasing the arrow to the wind.

With the bow I was the source of energy. Where I faced, how I stood and when I opened my hand decided where the arrow would go.

In terms of accuracy, most important was how I opened my hand.  A gentle, generous release was best.

Wallace Stevens

So that the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.

It was the last nostalgia: that he Should understand. That he might suffer or that He might die was the innocence of living, if life Itself was innocent. 

—From Esthétique du Mal, by Wallace Stevens

Anything close to accurate perception confirms I do not understand: not with any fullness, wholeness or finality.

Children in their innocence are natural empiricists, keen observers, but not for understanding. They sense to survive, to be in relationship, to become something more.

Suffering is attachment -- to people, to places, to things, to ideas, to the desire for understanding.

Is this understanding?

"The body dies; the body's beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going, / A wave, interminably flowing."

Is this understanding?

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

Is this understanding?

In the words of a painter, the abstract expressionist Pat Adams—

That marveling rush of wonder at sheer multiplicity and differentiation of stuff when surfaces of heightened materiality, of encrusted and layered imprinting are generated to entangle our attention and delay cognition

—until it seems that perpetual fear is a propellant into the innocent, fearless, and vulnerable world of the senses.

I recognize the sense of being propelled into the world of the senses.

But fear is not the fuel.

Curiosity is there, attraction to beauty too, and a compulsion to create.

I'm not sure about innocence, but being vulnerable and fearless is the yin and yang of this world.

I am not disagreeing with Ruefle, just reporting a different experience.  My poetry does not have her beauty, or Keats' or Rilke's or Rimbaud's. My painting does not have Picasso's rush of wonder.  My prose is not as compelling as Montaigne, Emerson, or Trilling. 

Perhaps I lack sufficient fear.

The suffering in these poems remains intact; it is neither resolved nor negated. What happens for the most part is, the poems dissolve, finally, into the cream of the physical world. If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage.

The artist uses sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing first and foremost.

Even before emotion, well before feeling.

Perceiving reality ought to precede any automatic response, cognition, ordering or meaning-making.

Uncertainty, mystery, doubt propels the person to depend on the power of perception -- much as a drowning man will grasp at anything that floats.

Perhaps the poet is distinguished from the non-poet in the cultivation of this perception long before the storm swells.

One has only to look at the opening lines of a majority of his poems to see him in a state of uncertainty, mystery, doubt—that is, fear:

"When I have fears that I may cease to be”
“Glory and loveliness have Pass’d away”
“My spirit is too weak—mortality”
“O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind”
“In a drear-nighted December”
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”
“If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d”
“O what can ail thee, knight at arms”
“Why did I laugh tonight?
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”

Rilke might respond to Keats:

Does Time, as it passes, really destroy?
It may rip the fortress from its rock;
but can this heart, that belongs to God,
be torn from Him by circumstance? 

Are we as fearfully fragile
as fate would have us believe?
Can we ever be severed
from childhood's deep promise? 

Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance. 

We in our striving think we should last forever,
but could we be used by the Divine
if we were not ephemeral?

Keats sought to understand much in his life; his poems and letters are full of urgent searching, of the kinds of questions that arise in the minds of passionate youth. He says in another letter:

You tell me never to despair—I wish it was as easy for me to observe the saying—truth is I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals—it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear—I may even say that it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.

For almost fifty years I have been troubled by depression.

It arises uninvited and unpredictably. It brings a morbidity of temperament that confuses truth, obscures beauty, and undoes goodness.  It is the cause of deep disappointment.

When I was younger I feared the onset of depression.  But I have learned to watch for its coming, abide its presence, and facilitate its passing.

Fear persists as powerless anticipation.  Watchful waiting is different.  Embracing the source of fear is neither fighting nor fleeing.

Fear signals that vulnerability and threat are about to intersect, as when the divorced parents of a beloved child meet at her wedding for the first time in many years, for the first time since he said to her, "I cannot live with you," and she replied, "You are disgusting."