A week before the election, everyone seems to be afraid.
The frightening visions have different names and faces, but everyone seems to fear the future.
But as psychologist Sarah Kollat wrote recently, Halloween thrills and chills can feel warming and reassuring. People who have survived a frightening shared ordeal, be it a hurricane, flood, fire, war or even, apparently, a haunted house, feel significantly connected to those who have experienced the event alongside them.
Fear can bring us together or tear us apart. Halloween provides the language to talk about threats, real or imagined. "The zombies have arrived, and we have to figure out how to navigate around them," a Vermont citizen recently reportedly said. She was talking about homeless people.It's both easy and helpful to personify fear as something outside of us - to give it, in Shakespeare's phrase, "a local habitation and a name."
Fear looms and fades; visits at night; thrives in certain conditions.In his epic The Aeneid, Virgil describes the war god, Mars, as accompanied by his posse: "the god's retainers - Treachery, Rage, and black Fear - pound beside him."
This nightmare troika has a contemporary ring.If by treachery we mean traps, tricks, ambushes, we can plug in political debate, rife with accusations of mendacity; tricks and rage also characterize a good deal of public discourse.
And isn't anger the opposite side of the coin of fear?Virgil, a great psychologist of many kinds of unease, also depicts a less aggressive manifestation of fear: "Up on the wall stood frightened mothers, gazing/After the dust cloud and the bronze-bright squadrons." Uneasy spectators, helpless to protect their loved ones, they watch their sons marching to war. In a similar passage, "mothers, the unarmed commons,/And weak old men came pouring out to fill/Towers and roofs."
Those of us not on a battlefield are in a position of tense watching and waiting. We feel powerless to affect the outcome; the stakes are high; we fear the worst.Fear is linked to love. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles is reluctant to fight for the Greeks not out of a fear of death, even though he knows his life may be short.
He's too angry to give his life for a cause and commanders he no longer believes in - until his beloved Patroklos is killed by Hector.Characters in Greek tragedies can make terrible decisions, be subject to madness, destroy themselves and others - but they are rarely afraid. The fear and pity Aristotle ascribes to tragedy are the emotions of the spectator.
One of the only characters in Greek tragedy who readily comes to mind is Admetus, husband of Alcestis in Euripides' play. Informed he is fated to die, Admetus scrambles frantically for a substitute to die in his place. His own father huffily refuses, but his wife Alcestis volunteers.When at the end a veiled, silent figure we presume to be Alcestis reappears, there's relief, as well as nervous laughter. This play, with its - sort of - happy ending, turns out not to be a tragedy after all. It's closer to dark comedy.
In our own time, rather than fear of death, fear of loss looms large - fear of isolation, humiliation, status; fear of poverty; fear of change.Elsewhere in the Aeneid, a character in the underworld makes a resonant remark about the afterlife: "Each bears his own ghosts."
Maybe each of us has our own flavor of fear. There's not much love or heroism in evidence these Halloween and preelection days. Anger and treachery, fear's companions, are on daily display.THE CONVERSATION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rachel Hadas is a professor at Rutgers University - Newark
