The beetle had been en route through the sky for several million years, when he met up with a hare.
“You’ll never get there at that pace,” the hare warned, and he offered to take the message himself.
The beetle handed over his mission: “Tell the women and the men that the moon says, ‘Like the moon gets reborn, so will you.’ “
And the hare, running with the fleetness of a hare, set off for Earth.
Rather sooner than later, he landed in the jungle of southern Africa, where people lived in those days, and without pausing to catch his breath he passed on the moon’s words. The hare, who is always leaving even before he arrives, spoke in his usual headlong way. And the women and the men understood him to say, “The moon gets reborn, not you.”
Ever since, we have been doomed to suffer the fear of dying, which is the father of all fears.
The Art of Ruling
An emperor of China — no one knows his name or his dynasty or his epoch — summoned his principal adviser one night and confided the anguish that would not let him sleep. “No one fears me,” he said.
Since his subjects weren’t afraid of him, they did not respect him. Since they did not respect him, they did not obey him.
“It takes punishment,” the adviser suggested.
The emperor said he had already ordered anyone who failed to pay tribute to be whipped, anyone who did not bow when he passed to be tortured slowly, and anyone who dared criticize his decisions to be sent to the gallows.
“But those are the guilty,” the adviser said. And he explained: “Power without fear deflates like a lung without air. If you punish only the guilty, only the guilty feel afraid.”
The emperor meditated in silence and said, “I understand.”
He ordered the executioner to cut off the adviser’s head, and he commanded the entire population of Beijing to witness the spectacle in the Plaza of Celestial Power.
The adviser was first on a long list.
The Anatomy of Fear
The day is born, touched by the sun’s fingers.
In the countryside of El Salvador, women light fires and begin their chores.
“How did you dawn?” they ask, because, like the day, they dawn.
And by their bodies they know what the new day will bring.
During the war years, every woman’s body at dawn was a map of fear. If fear pressed against her breasts, one of her sons would not return. A sharp pain in the belly meant the army was approaching. And if her kidneys ached, there would not be enough water in the well and she would have to risk their lives searching for more.
Fright
The river nearly swallowed her.
Eufrosina Martinez was washing clothes when the current caught her and dragged her downstream. After a lot of flailing about among the rocks, she managed to save herself, but she lost her soul. The fright took it. Her soul, scared stiff, sank and vanished from sight.
After that, the soulless body of Eufrosina could not move or eat or sleep or distinguish night from day.
A healer from the mountains of Puebla cured her. Her soul returned from fear and rejoined her body. Then Eufrosina rose and walked once more on this earth that sometimes snatches your feet from under you, like an angry river.
The Bogeyman
Playing nonstop, everybody thrown in together, the kids lived in a joyous scramble of bugs, children, and plants.
But one awful day, some wanderer reached that tail end of nowhere in the expanses of Paysandu and brought fear.
“Watch out, the bogeyman’s coming!”
“The bogeyman is coming to take you away!”
“The bogeyman is coming to eat you up!”
Olga Hughes noticed the first symptoms of the plague. A sickness that no pharmacy can cure began to afflict her numerous children. And that’s when she chose from among her many dogs the tamest and friendliest one, and baptized him Bogeyman.
The Magic Flute
Through the streets wandered the healer of tools that had lost their edge.
The sharpener’s foot spun the emery wheel and pulled showers of sparks from the blades of knives, razors, scissors. We neighborhood kids, a swarm of admirers, were the audience for the show.
Just as the organ announced the wafer man, the flute was the crier for the sharpener.
People said if you were thinking about something and heard the sound of that flute, you changed your mind on the spot.
Practically no sharpeners remain on the streets of cities; the whistle of their flutes no longer drifts in through open windows. Other songs resound instead, tunes of trepidation, airs of alarm, and many are the people who change their minds in a flash.
The Plague
The ship glided south along the Swedish coast on a calm sea.
It was a splendid summer morning. The passengers sat on deck enjoying the sun and the soft breeze, waiting for breakfast.
Suddenly, a girl ran to the railing and threw up.
Then the woman beside her did the same. Immediately, two men got up and followed suit. One after another, the rest of the passengers seated in the bow also vomited.
Those seated on the poop deck laughed at the ridiculous spectacle, but soon a few of them were leaning out over the calm sea and putting their fingers down their throats, and others followed.
No one could keep from vomiting.
Victor Klemperer was in one of the seats farthest aft. To keep from joining the retch-fest, he concentrated on the meal to come: coffee with cream, orange marmalade. .
Then the passengers in the stern had their turn. Every one of them threw up. He did too.
Klemperer forgot about this incident. It came back to him a few years later in Germany, during Hitler’s unstoppable ascent.
Red Alert
The country no one invades, and has the habit of invading others, is terrified of being invaded.
In the eighties, the threat was called Nicaragua. President Ronald Reagan fumigated public opinion with toxic clouds of fear. When he went on TV to decry the danger, a red tide flowed across the map projected behind him. A torrent of blood and communism spread from Central America, washed over Mexico, and penetrated the United States through Texas.
The TV audience hadn’t a clue where Nicaragua was. Nor did they know it was a barefoot country flattened by half a century of dictatorship manufactured in Washington, and by an earthquake that erased much of the city of Managua from the map.
The fount of fear had a total of five elevators, plus an escalator that wasn’t working.
The Opinion Mill
It was the year 1964, and the dragon of international communism spread all seven of its maws wide-open to devour Chile alive.
Ads bombarded public opinion with images of burned-out churches, concentration camps, Russian tanks, a Berlin wall in downtown Santiago, and bearded guerrillas carting off children.
Elections were held.
Fear triumphed.
Salvador Allende was defeated.
During those painful days, I asked him what hurt the most. And Allende told me what had happened right over there, at his neighbor’s house in the barrio of Providencia. The woman who broke her back working there as cook, maid, and nanny in return for a pittance, put all the clothes she owned in a plastic bag and buried it in her bosses’ backyard. So the enemies of private property couldn’t take them from her.