DIALOGUE ON ANXIETY
157
F: Which is?
H:
In that state of deep
malaise
and boredom when we retreat
from each particular thing around us; when nothing can attract or
lure us out of ourselves; when even the prospect of being God! Him–
self, understanding all nature and history, seems to be infected with
the possibility of this boredom; then, I say, there arises the bottomless
intuition: It is possible that nothing at all should exist. And with it
the inevitable question: Why does anything at all exist? We confront
the contingency of the world nakedly. It is the fundamental intellec–
tual condition of man.
F: Suppose we grant that this is a valid intellectual question.
I do not see, however, that human beings will ever be in a position
to answer it. But in what relates specifically to anxiety, I have an
even more pertinent question: Is it possible that men should feel this
overwhelming anxiety at a purely speculative question unless it is a
displacement of something else in their lives? A cosmic anxiety, such
as you depict, can become gripping only where there is some much
more humble and personal cause for being anxious, which is able
to load this other anxiety with its charge.
H:
We have the case of Pascal, do we not? His is just that
cosmic anxiety. And it becomes the source of his total vision of the
human condition, thus generating one of the imperishable records
of human experience.
F: Pascal's is a case very much in point. Other men have
faced his question but continued thereafter to function with greater
equanimity. The anxiety that he suffers at "the silence of these infinite
spaces" we know to be the result of much more personal sources of
anguish. Certainly, the
force
of this anxiety is not generated by the
intellectual question itself. This is the neurotic displacement of genius:
the neurotic effects, displaced, are able to appropriate large areas
of experience-thus resulting in that moving and
personal
vision of
the great writer. But we must also remember the price paid for the
neurosis: the mutilation as well as the vision that results. Pascal's
Pensees
ought not to make us forget his
Lettres Provinciales,
which
are a greater monument of connected prose and composed out of a
-mockery that is even gay. Had he escaped the shipwreck of his neu–
rosis, the fragments of the
Pensees
might have fused finally into the
great work of apologetics he projected: a work that might have been
as connectedly eloquent as the
Provinciales.
H:
What a dismal prospect you hold out! Had he conquered
his anxiety, he might have completed a great work of apologetics,
