TRANSMUTING FEAR

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 57, 8 March 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

TRANSMUTING FEAR

CAPITALISING COURAGE. ALL COWARDS AT HEART. A DEFINITE FUNCTION. (By WAINWRIGHT EVANS.) The proverb says that a cornered rat will fight. Did you ever see one do it? —I did. He was holding his own against three dogs in the gutter of a city street; and his fight for his life -was -watched by a breathless crowd that circled ten deep around the struggle and blocked traffic I regardless of the not too emphatic exj post illations of a policeman who was divided between his duty as an officer and his desire to see what the rat was going to do about it. Little by little the fight edged along towards the drain, where the water of the gutter turned and flowed out of sight like a brown ribbon. The rat picked the biggest of the dogs, apparently because it was he who now blocked the road to safety; hurled himself straight at the open mouth and, as the startled foe drew back roaring with the pain of a bitten jowel, whirled and slipped with hardly a splash into the dusk of his own congenial world. He was gone.

I once read a story about a man who was a failure because he was obsessed by an unacknowledged fear of everything and everybody. All Natural Cowards. A girl loved him, for the unanswerable reason that such women sometimes do love just such men. She understood him and tried to make him over. But she failed; and at last she refused to marry him because of the yellow streak that tinged his life. She told him she could not marry a coward. That put up to him the problem: How could he, a coward, become a brave man For an answer he sought out a man who was conspicuous for the very qualities he lacked, a very rough customer who was a great success in the prize ring. "Do you want to get shocked?" asked the ring gentleman. "Well, I'll tell you the truth; you ain't the only coward; I'm a coward myself." Whereupon he expounded his rough theory of courage. Every human being, in his opinion, is a natural-born coward. If he isn't afraid of one thing he is afraid of something else. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being afraid, therefore, it's what you do after you're afraid that counts. In other words, whether you can control those reactions. In the prize ring the man who does not feel fear lacks imagination, fire and energy, and is likely to lose against the • man who feels fear, and who uses it as a whip to drive him into extremes of energetic action of which he would not, in a more placid mood, be capable. His fear becomes ferocity, if you will. Stimulates Imagination. That was as far as the prize-fighter could carry his notion. But the troubled young man seized on it avidly. It flashed upon him that here was the key. Evidently this prize-fighter did one thing with his fears, while he, the coward, did the exact opposite with his. Fear has a definite and limited function. That function is to stick a pin, so to speak, into the most fundamental of our instincts, self-preservation. Having, by so doing, riveted the attention on the problem at hand, it retires to the background, and makes way for courage, which is the quality that plays positive to its negative. It awakens our imagination. Fear is the first startling image of the thing not desired. The blacks are white and the whites are black. 1L is there to be translated into positives of action. The simple fact that it represents the thing not desired is what makes it horrible, and makes any continued contemplation of it as destructive and unnerving as any other contemplation of evil. The fear of losing is also the desire to win; but the outcome depends on which of the two images one keeps in one's mind —the pale and ghastly negative or the normal vision of reality, seen coolly through normal eyes. To fear without courage is literally to see things as they are not. The common phrase "cast out fear" has a deep psychological significance.— (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)

ARTISTS AND THEIR RECORDS (By SOUNDBOX.)