AT THE EVENING MEAL each Friday as the Community of the College House tarries longer around the table for conversation. a guest lecturer of outstanding competence in his field is invited to speak and carry on a discussion with the students on some aspect of the growing, edge of thought in the discipline of which he is a part. Lectures in art, philosophy, literature, international relations, history. politics, psychology, etc. are included in these Friday Dinner Programs.

THE NATURE OF THE FRIDAY DINNER PROGRAM changes from year to year. but the overall intention is the creation of a genuine living dialogue between the Church and the culture in which we live, with the firm conviction that such dialogue enables us to grasp the meaning of being a person of faith in the new world of the twentieth century and significantly contributes to our ability to articulate this faith to ourselves and other people.

THIS ARTICLE is from a Friday evening address by Dr. William Arrowsmith of the Department of Classical Languages of the University of Texas.

REPEATEDI.Y DURING THE LAST TWO OR THREE DECADES historians and critics of literature have been forced to take into account a phenomenon which, for want of a better name, they have called Anxiety. For the more one looked at contemporary literature, the more it seemed to be pervaded by a strange form of terror. This Anxiety, moreover, not only affected the atmosphere of literature, but its springs of action as well. Poetry, the novel, drama, as well as the obiter dicta of writers and intellectuals, were filled with references to Anxiety or tacitly invoked it, and this prevalence of Anxiety in literature was confirmed by the other arts as well.

Anxiety appeared to he something rather new. While one could find it in the nineteenth­century and in Augustine's Rome. it was never found so self­consciously and with such obsessive emphasis as in the twentieth century. Still worse, it was intolerably difficult to analyze: one could hardly define it except in terms which impoverished its terror.

I was once asked the following question by a friend who was being outwitted by his psychoanalyst and was showing the required aggression. "What do you call it," he asked, "when you think people are persecuting you, and they really are." Whatever his neurosis may have been, that question has always seemed to me to be rich with Anxiety. Typical not so much in the feelings of paranoia, as in the fear the paranoia might be objective, might be rooted in real facts. For right at the basis of Anxiety, I think, is the notion of the utter

displacement of ordinary reality. Anxiety begins, as it were, with a kind of ontological terror. The sufferer from Anxiety may exhibit the clinical symptoms of familiar neuroses, but he is not merely a case of neurosis. What worries him is precisely the instability and amorphousness of what the world calls reality and normality. Is it the sufferer who is sick? Who has distorted reality? or is it his entire culture which has gone mad? To the psychologist who claims that Anxiety is, after all, only a familiar family of related neuroses, the sufferer replies that this misses the point altogether. My experience, he claims, has been atrociously impoverished by the psychologist's terms. And in so replying I think he is perfectly correct.

He is correct because Anxiety mocks all accepted norms of reality and all definitions of sickness and health. It rejects the very standard, the cultural definition of normality, by which the psychologist proposes to test for neurosis. It constantly whispers that it is the world and society and its agents, the psychologists with their corrupted yardsticks, which are mad and that those whom the world thinks sick are really healthy This rejection of the world's power to judge who is sick and who is not is, of course, precariously maintained; it is constantly under the threat of being swamped by society's massive self-assurance that all criteria flow from it. And the cost in alienation and the absurdity of the solipsism the position demands constantly undercut the passion of its perceptions. In its purist form Anxiety is arrogant with all the arrogance of men who have been saved towards those who have not.

This is perhaps a peculiar sense of "power," but it is power nonetheless. The kind of power, I suppose, a man might feel if he could manage to transform himself into a Platonic Idea and know what it meant to he wholly separate from the world and yet be its measure. In its absolute form Anxiety is, I think, very closely akin to a metaphysical experience, and almost religious -- a succumbing to the divine power of your Terror and therefore an earning of salvation. Anxiety moves in on you, possesses you; you become its enthusiast and bend the world into the shape of your strange God. On the inside, it feels comfortable and oh so smooth: on the outside, it looks like a kind of ontological morbidity. I recognize that "metaphysics" is a dangerous word, and it may seem that there is no need of invoking metaphysics to account for some thing so terribly and empirically present as Anxiety. But I think we have to account for the peculiar kind of Anxiety which is genuinely unconvinced by evidence which might controvert it: what does it mean, after all, if there comes a point in the life­cycle of Anxiety when the facts don't really matter any longer? It is not just that Anxiety is spelled with a capital A, or comes from the country where all metaphysics arise nor even the extraordinary resistance it makes to analysis. What matters is the way in which pure­Anxiety men talk of their experience, the special status they invoke for it, their invulnerability to empirical contradiction, and their singular humorlessness about it all - these traits cast them in the traditional metaphysical pattern. It is because their Anxiety has become a metaphysics of terror that they distort reality even further and insist upon their condition as guaranteeing them both power and salvation

continued from page one

HOW THEN IS LITERATURE RELATED TO ANXIETY? It is, of course, diagnostic; it tells us the shape and size of our trouble and our reaction to it, and confronts us with this image. If, as I insist, what is crucial in Anxiety is the truth of our perceptions-without which we are carried along with one or the other of the fallen angels-then the very activity of diagnosis is central. It is literature that particularizes our terrors, gives them a local habitation and a name." Literature extrapolates or diminishes the truth at its own cost: if the imagination is exact and observation ferocious, then Anxiety is intensified, but not falsified. And lest this seem humdrum, remember that a great part of the terror in Anxiety, as well as the crucial danger, is its very stubbornness to analysis, its front of mystery. Unless our Anxiety is clearly named, we are in danger of hypostatizing it and giving it a dimension altogether outside of the world. This does not, of course, mean that literature waves a wand and our anguish withers; what is exorcised is the irrational, even supernatural form of Anxiety. I think there is no place in any literature, except an impoverished one, for what I have called absolute Anxiety. No metaphysical monster which is maintained, as pure Anxiety is, by systematic distortion of the world, can be made to flourish in the particulars from which it has been abstracted. It withers when confronted by the truths of its own nature and the necessity of human beings to live with their terrors.

Because literature must be exact with all the exactitude of the imagination, it gives us the fullest image of our predicament. Because literature, unlike philosophy, or intellectual history or science, operates with all the modes of the mind and not with merely one of them, it gives us the fullest image of our own behavior when confronted by our predicament, and thus permits us to assess our fears in relation to our hopes. It may, or it may not, attempt to prescribe specific remedies, but usually this is not its business. Its real concern is with the refreshment of possibility and the domestication of Angst into the human condition.

By domestication of Anxiety I don't, of course, mean the taming of it. You don't housebreak a nightmare. What we must know and what literature at its best tells us is what part of the anguish of our time is our fate and what our misfortune. In so doing. it helps to refresh possibility, for one can work with misfortune but not with fate. Again it forces back into the play of the mind all the material which is suppressed by the needful logic of Anxiety; and more than that it forces the full mind itself back into play. What it thus reminds us of is what we fail to assert as well as the cost of the assertions we do make. Sophocles' Antigone. for instance, is really about what she fails to assert and the cost of all she does assert.

Look at Anxiety a little more closely from this point of assertions and their cost. To hold steadily, without swerving, to the truth of what one sees, to refuse to palliate it or exaggerate it, appears to me the bounden duty of all who suffer from Anxiety: only by looking steadily at the nightmare of our time can we hope to recover the opportunity which will restore us our lost power. This requires great endurance and _real courage, perhaps more than most of us can afford. Our danger is that we become all endurance, that we lose a part of our human skills by having to steel ourselves so constantly. Anxiety. that is, like "great suffering," "makes a stone of the heart''. Our perpetual seriousness castrates us of our humor and our sense of proportion: slowly but inexorably it kills the whole variety of means we have within us for combating trouble. But because literature works with the discourse of the whole mind, employing_ all the mind's skills without preference, it refreshes our humanity and our possibilities. Think, for instance, of that tag in the Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

It is this that literature can do with Angst: to bring us to the place from which we started, so we know it for the first time. There is no question here of either of those atrocious words-optimism or pessimism. Good literature is as far beyond mere optimism and pessimism as Anxiety is beyond mere trouble and neurosis. Anxiety is not palliated in literature, but given the intensification of truth. Literature does not save: it forces the reluctant to recognize the abyss, to look at it. In the act of looking, it reminds us of the variety of the means we have for keeping our balance. We know our terror for the first time, but the terror is transformed because we also know ourselves.

FINALLY, THE VERY ART OF WRITING IS ITSELF AN ACT OF ORDER. As Elizabeth Bowen says, Writing is the writer's means of getting a relation to his society." It is a willful act, writing, whose purpose is not to put a fraudulent order on the disorder in the world. but to find room for chaos in a general order-if logic can tolerate that kind of language. A whole culture may crack apart, hut it is an important assertion that writing makes, perhaps only a hypothesis, in the standards by which it judges chaos. Finally, literature holds out to us the hope of incorporating just what our society's commitments are in a world that appears to make commitments difficult. This is the task for the major artist, what I call the Vergilian job, the creation of a culture in its partial absence. In the last few years the writer has had to learn that he can't come by a ready­made myth which can he simply invested with values. As R.P. Blackmur puts it, the "whole joh of culture," the creating of a myth which we can live by, has 'been dumped on the artist's hands."

I recently received a letter from a friend doing graduate work at Harvard. It was a letter full of what I call local and low­pressure Anxiety, a whole chain of domestic and professional troubles. His thesis was going badly; one child had mumps: his life had cystitis; he had no job; Christian humanism was coming, to Harvard, etc, etc., etc. He concluded as follows:

I like to think of a rock somewhere in the Mediterranean, with me on it, skin turning slowly from bronze to brown as I think slow lizardlike thoughts. On shore my three lives and sixteen children look out at me and their hearts fill with love-not for the rich comfort in which I keep them (though, of course, they are grateful for that), not because they think I am talented or important or necessary to them (though all these may enter)-they crown me king of their love, just for the sweet man I am. And I? I take it for granted.

That letter seems to me to be passing into something like literature at the close. It looks at first glance like simple escapism, the common wish fulfillment of us all; but look at it again, and what you see is only the delicate irony, the emergence of just those skills of proportion and loving self­mockery, that keep us sane in our troubles and our necessities.