Literalists insist God has a bad temper and we’d better believe it. Does God, then, keep his cool all the time? Does he get fighting mad as we do? Theologians debate the subject to this day. Jewish thinkers regard equanimity as the foundation of moral and spiritual development. Hot heads or nervous wrecks always make the worst calls. Most Christians regard God as cool and see equanimity as our necessary condition for being gentle, loving, content, charitable and even prudent. Cool is the post-modern word for equanimity. We call someone cool who remains unperturbed in the face of danger. When the storm finally passed she became her old self again. We heard no thunder nor could see a darkened sky. When she began trembling, slinked away and hid under a table while scratching the floor as if making a foxhole, we knew a storm was soon in the making. On summer nights, long before we had any indication that a thunderstorm was in the works, she’d exhibit preternatural instincts for sensing approaching thunderstorms. She suffered terribly from astraphobia, the fear of thunder and lightning. We had a dog-named Spunky, a lovable mutt. I’d say confidently that anyone who does not suffer from galeophobia, the fear of sharks, is really crazy, or if not, an exceptional speed swimmer. While ringing the bell the interred also prayed that the mistake was just accidental. If the deceased discovered he wasn’t really dead, but that he had been interred prematurely, he could pull a chain, ringing the bell and alerting the living above ground that his relatives made a colossal mistake. Pre-deceased planning included arranging a bell above ground and attached to the casket below. In Britain, during the Victorian era, the fear of being buried alive – taphophobia – was endemic. With regard to coasterphobia, the only reason hardly any kids have that phobia is they aren’t old enough to know better. These are respectively the fear of sharks the fear of doctors fear of ghosts fear of depths (like a deep well) fear of roller coasters and the fear of being buried alive. I’d feel normal only from the 79th Street station south until the 42nd Street station.Īs I see it, not all phobias are necessarily weird or pathological: galeophobia, latraphobia, phasmophobia, bathophobia, coasterphobia and taphophobia, to name a few. As soon as the train started rolling, no matter how slowly, I’d feel safe again. When it stopped between stations, invariably between 42nd and 34th Streets I’d feel frightened. As long as the train moved along in the subway, even at a snail’s pace, I was fine. It was a phobia tailored particularly to my commute downtown. When I lived in New York City I was plagued with claustrophobia. On a ladder two stories high? Out of the question. He had made some mental accommodations to his fear – maybe something like whistling in the dark – so that in the safety of his cockpit and in control of the plane, he could somehow manage his phobia. I asked him how that could be? After all he was spending half his life in the air. We were talking one day and he told me that he was afraid of heights.
PATHOLOGICAL FEAR OF THUNDERSTORMS PROFESSIONAL
Years ago I knew a man who was a professional pilot and flew cargo all over the world. My guess is that most of us have phobias and are shy about anyone knowing about them. Other phobias are treated simply as quirks. Phobias, as they’re commonly understood, suggest abnormalities and they can generate personal shame. When you’re neurotic, it’s comforting to think of yourself as a normal one.
It made me feel as if my fear of heights – acrophobia – left me well inside the human condition and that I was not just a scaredy-cat, as I’d so often thought. I thought that gave my anxieties a touch of class. The often goofy phobias that I’ve suffered over the years were distinctive enough to be dignified with a diagnostic term, in a foreign language, too. However, I found some comfort in what the book revealed. Temperamentally I have an anxious personality. Reading this suggested to me that we’re scaredy-cats in a bewildering number of ways. ‘Fear’ constituted the only word in the book that had so many distinct synonyms.Īll of the sixty-five words denoting morbid fears ended with ‘phobia’- the Greek word meaning fear – and the first part of each word, typically in Greek or another foreign word, designating the object of the fear. That was for the word ‘fear.’ There were no less than sixty-five words identifying our various morbid fears. Each word had anywhere from one to five synonyms listed for that particular word. The book contained two hundred and five pages and a ton of words ranging from A to Z, – roughly six thousand words in total. The book seemed too elitist for me.Ĭurious, however, I thumbed through the pages.
It’s titled The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate. While cleaning my library the other day, I came across a book.
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