Jack understands fear. For most people, fear is scarcely a word; it’s a connotation. For most people, fear is common and vulgar. For most people, fear is a reaction — a practiced response to a carefully contrived sense of danger that has been nurtured by a generation of men and women who, with bravery and dignity, faced utter annihilation in the early dawn of the nuclear era only to drive themselves to madness twenty years later, consumed by the fear of making less money than their neighbors.
For Jack, fear is experiential. For Jack, fear comes from the common and the vulgar, because true fear rarely takes the form of big things like nuclear war, widespread famine, catastrophic natural disasters, the death of children, the end of the world, or godlessness and fascism. The big things are unavoidable. The big things are incomprehensible. In the lexicon of fear, these are the mundane things. Real fear is born in what most people consider the mundane — the everyday, pedestrian realities of the world’s little towns and neighborhoods. Real fear, like Sartre’s hell, is other people. What they do behind closed doors. What they say behind your back. The perverse acts they might reveal to you one day at a party. The invitations they may extend.
Real fear is knowing that tomorrow you will wake. And that everything will be the same.
