To sharks, the surface of the sea is the enormous mouth of hell¹. An immense overhead vortex filled to bursting with sunlight.

I’ve lived most of my life with a deep sense of terror, the mental state of a deer walking back and forth forever across a busy highway at night. Or I guess, a shark bobbing along the shallows, staring into the blinding white holocaust of its own tartarus. Hell throws pale caustics along the seafloor, dancing and burning and shivering.

I thought this was abnormal and spent a lot of time thinking about how this fear and dread might be unique to me, especially as I saw the people around me go about their daily lives utterly unfazed. If you have alarm bells constantly clamoring inside of you, it’s no wonder you become a selfish and solipsistic person. You can’t really spare an ounce of attention on anything else if there is an unbearable, endless scream coming from inside of you, every second of every day. Unlike you, it never runs out of breath.

A month ago I wrote about idiots but never made it clear that I was one of those private people in question. Not that it required any mental gymnastics to conclude; it only makes sense that the definition terrified me because I saw so much of myself in its dull history.

I was wrong, though, and not even all that deep down, I knew I was wrong. This sort of anxiety is nothing new, or unique. Cue that beautiful, if a little overused James Baldwin quote:

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.

This effect only compounds the further the author is from you, whether temporally or geographically (and therefore culturally). Here I am in 2024 sitting in the belly of the convalescent American empire, reading Heraclitus, a man who believed that everything in the world came from fire, and to fire all things would eventually return. His most famous aphorism must be the observation that you never step in the same river twice. In the 5th century BC he wrote that the sun we saw rising with every morning was in fact new, a fresh incarnation appearing every twenty-four hours.

Two thousand years later, the French astronomer, mathematician, and engineer Laplace would try and produce a formal answer to the so-called “sunrise problem”, which asks, “what is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?”, using Bayesian statistical methods which are now a standard part of high-school stats curricula everywhere—what was once cutting-edge research mathematics is now accessible to precocious twelve-year-olds.

And of course, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is far older than Heraclitus and Laplace both, says,

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new is under the sun.

But not every object of study must be something as old and fundamental as the sun. So much has accumulated and been packed into dense strata of information. Some of this is conveyed to newer generations and much more of it is lost forever. Every day the world must produce exabytes of data while just as much is rendered inaccessible or just annihilated. Some people say that the last scholar to have read everything ever published in his time was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he died in the 1800s. I don’t know what would happen if someone could theoretically compress and embed mankind’s collective textual output into his brain now; maybe it would be like those ridiculously large numbers that pop up in Ramsey theory which would literally cause a black hole to form in your brain, if you could physically comprehend them in their whole.

All of this to say that there’s been enough written about the sad, wet, spiritual discharge that I started with. Many people produce it almost involuntarily, dribbling out of you all mucosal. So why do I choose to continue writing this anyway?

But of course, once you yourself experience it, you get the feeling that it must be the first manifestation of its kind in the world. “It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”² Nothing really assuages this terror. Though I have to believe that, like grief, or other sadnesses, it somehow ends up taking up less and less measure as time goes on, until one day you realise you’ve gone twenty-four hours without having noticed that internal scream.

I’m a long way from that day, though.