One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull. As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."
Jednog dana, 1819. godine, 5000 km od obale Čilea, na jednom od najudaljenijih mjesta u Tihom oceanu, 20 američkih mornara gledalo je kako im se brod puni vodom. Udario ih je kit ulješura i napravio ogromnu rupu u trupu broda. Dok im je brod tonuo među valovima, mornari su se stisnuli zajedno u tri mala čamca. Bili su 16 000 km udaljeni od kuće i više od 1600 km udaljeni od najbližeg kopna. U svojim čamcima imali su samo najosnovniju navigacijsku opremu i ograničene količine hrane i vode. Bili su to kitolovci s broda Essex, čija priča će kasnije nadahnuti neke dijelove "Moby Dicka".
Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search party was coming to look for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid. We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean.
Čak i danas bi takva situacija bila strašna, no zamislite kako je strašno njima tada bilo. Nitko na kopnu ne zna da je nešto pošlo po zlu. Nije pokrenuta potraga za njima. Većina nas se nikada nije našla u tako strašnoj situaciji kao što je to slučaj s ovim mornarima, ali svi znamo kako je to bojati se. Znamo osjećaj straha, ali mislim da ne razmišljamo dovoljno o tome što naši strahovi znače.
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it's no accident that we think this way. Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself. "Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic." In English, fear is something we conquer. It's something we fight. It's something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?
Kada odrastamo, uče nas da razmišljamo o strahu kao o slabosti, o još jednoj djetinjoj stvari koje se treba riješiti, poput mliječnih zuba ili koturaljki. Mislim da nije slučajno što tako razmišljamo. Neuroznanstvenici su, zapravo, dokazali da su ljudi programirani da budu optimisti. Zato možda nekada razmišljamo o strahu kao o opasnosti. "Ne brini", volimo reći jedni drugima. "Bez panike". U engleskom je strah nešto što pobjeđujemo. Nešto protiv čega se borimo. Nešto što svladavamo. No, što ako pogledamo strah iz drugog kuta? Što ako razmislimo o strahu kao o nevjerojatnom djelu mašte, nečem što može biti duboko i pronicljivo, poput pričanja priča?
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid. When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping. And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination. But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up. We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down. But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species," "Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past," also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust. So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children?
Vezu između straha i mašte najlakše je vidjeti kod male djece, čiji su strahovi često veoma snažni. Kao dijete sam živjela u Kaliforniji, koja je uglavnom lijepo mjesto za život, ali tada je za mene znala biti dosta strašna. Sjećam se kako je zastrašujuće bilo promatrati luster iznad stola u blagovaonici kako se njiše za vrijeme svakog manjeg potresa i nekada noću nisam mogla spavati u strahu da će Veliki udariti kada spavamo. Za djecu koja imaju takve strahove kažemo da imaju bujnu maštu. No, nakon nekog vremena većina nas ostavi takva zamišljanja iza sebe i odraste. Naučimo da nema čudovišta ispod kreveta i da neće svaki potres srušiti kuću. No, možda nije slučajno da se neki od najkreativnijih umova ne mogu riješiti tih strahova ni kada odrastu. Mašte koje su nam dale "Podrijetlo vrsta," "Jane Eyre" i "U potrazi za izgubljenim vremenom," stvorile su i brige koje su proganjale odrasle živote Charlesa Darwina, Charlotte Bronte i Marcela Prousta. Pitanje je što mi ostali možemo naučiti o strahu od vizionara i male djece?
Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex. Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific. Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship. The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options. In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. But they'd heard some frightening rumors. They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner. Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms. Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America. But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died.
Vratimo se na trenutak u 1819. godinu, onome što proživljavaju mornari Essexa. Pogledajmo strahove koji su se stvarali u njihovim glavama dok su plutali Tihim oceanom. Prošla su 24 sata od prevrtanja broda. Došlo je vrijeme da naprave plan, ali su imali jako malo mogućnosti. U svom nevjerojatnom opisu te katastrofe, Nathaniel Philbrick napisao je da su bili na najvećoj mogućoj udaljenosti od kopna na Zemlji. Znali su da je najbliži otok do kojeg mogu stići Markižansko otočje udaljeno 1900 km. No, čuli su uznemirujuće glasine. Rečeno im je da te otoke i nekoliko obližnjih, nastanjuju kanibali. Zamišljali su kako dolaze do obale gdje će ih ubiti i pojesti za večeru. Druga mogućnost bili su Hawaii, no zbog godišnjeg doba kapetan se bojao da će upasti u jake oluje. Posljednja mogućnost bila je najduža i najteža: ploviti 2400 km na jug nadajući se da će uhvatiti određene vjetrove koji bi ih mogli pogurnuti prema obali Južne Amerike. No, znali su da bi zbog same duljine putovanja morali jako štediti na zalihama hrane i vode. Pojest će ih kanibali, umrijet će u oluji ili od gladi prije nego dođu do kopna. Ti su strahovi zaokupljali umove ovih jadnih mornara i, kao što se pokazalo, strah koji odluče poslušati odredit će hoće li preživjeti ili umrijeti.
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it. It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters. In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel. Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire. Fears also have suspense. If I've done my job as a storyteller today, you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex. Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.
Sve te strahove možemo nazvati drugačijim imenom. Što ako ih umjesto strahovima, nazovemo pričama? Ako malo razmislite, strah je upravo to. Kao neka nenamjerna priča koju od rođenja znamo pričati. Strah i pričanje priča imaju ista obilježja. Imaju istu strukturu. Kao i sve priče, strahovi imaju likove. U našim strahovima mi smo ti likovi. Strahovi imaju i zaplete. Imaju početak, sredinu i kraj. Ukrcate se na avion. Avion poleti. Motor se pokvari. Naši strahovi sadrže i slike koje mogu biti stvarne poput onih koje nalazite na stranicama romana. Zamislite kanibala, ljudske zube kako grizu ljudsku kožu, ljudsko meso kako se peče na vatri. Strahovi imaju i trenutak neizvjesnosti. Ako sam danas dobro ispričala priču, trebali biste se pitati što se dogodilo mornarima broda Essex. Naši strahovi u nama bude sličan osjećaj neizvjesnosti. Kao i sve velike priče, naši strahovi zadržavaju nam pažnju na pitanju koje je važno i u životu i u književnosti: Što će se sljedeće dogoditi? Dakle, strahovi nas tjeraju da razmišljamo o budućnosti. A ljudi su jedina stvorenja koja mogu na taj način razmišljati o budućnosti, zamisliti sebe u budućem vremenu i to mentalno putovanje kroz vrijeme je još jedna zajednička značajka strahova i pričanja priča.
As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way. In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another. When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down. What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops? What would happen to our minds? And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night. If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family? And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story. So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories. But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.
Kao spisateljica znam da je kod pisanja fikcije važno naučiti predvidjeti kako jedan događaj utječe na sve ostale događaje, a strah funkcionira na isti način. Kod straha, kao i kod fikcije, jedna stvar vodi drugoj. Kada sam pisala svoj prvi roman "Doba čuda", mjesecima sam pokušavala saznati što bi se dogodilo kada bi se Zemlja odjednom počela sve sporije okretati. Što bi se dogodilo s danima? Što bi se dogodilo s usjevima? Što bi se dogodilo s našim umovima? Tek kasnije sam shvatila koliko su ta pitanja slična onima koja sam si postavljala kao uplašeno dijete tijekom noći. Brinula sam se što će se dogoditi s našom kućom ako dođe do potresa večeras? Što će se dogoditi mojoj obitelji? Odgovor na to pitanje uvijek je bio u obliku priče. Ako mislimo o strahovima kao o nečem više, kao o pričama, moramo misliti o sebi kao o autorima tih priča. Što je još važnije, moramo misliti o sebi kao o čitateljima naših strahova i način na koji čitamo svoje strahove može veoma utjecati na naš život.
Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action. So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready.
Neki od nas svoje strahove čitaju pažljivije od drugih. Nedavno sam čitala o istraživanju o uspješnim poduzetnicima i autor je saznao da svi imaju jednu naviku koju je nazvao "produktivnom paranojom", što znači da su ti ljudi, umjesto da ignoriraju strahove, pažljivo pročitali svoje strahove, proučili ih i zatim ih pretvorili u pripremu i djelovanje. Tako je njihovo poslovanje bilo spremno ako dođe do ostvarivanja najgorih strahova.
And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear. Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick," wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti. But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals." So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation? Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other? Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific. A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.
Ponekad se, naravno, naši najgori strahovi i ostvare. To je jedna od nevjerojatnih stvari kod strahova. Tu i tamo naši strahovi mogu predvidjeti budućnost. No, ne možemo se pripremiti za sve strahove koje naš um može izmisliti. Kako onda možemo razlikovati strahove koje treba slušati od svih ostalih strahova? Mislim da završetak priče o brodu Essexu nudi poučan, iako tragičan primjer. Nakon mnogo razmišljanja, mornari su konačno odlučili. U strahu od kanibala odlučili su zaobići najbliže otoke i uputiti se na duže i puno teže putovanje do Južne Amerike. Nakon više od dva mjeseca na moru, ponestalo im je hrane, kao što su i znali, a bili su još daleko od kopna. Kada su posljednje preživjele spasila dva broda, manje od polovice mornara je bilo živo, a neki su pribjegli vlastitom obliku kanibalizma. Herman Melville, koji je tu priču koristio pri pisanju "Moby Dicka", kasnije je, s kopna, napisao, "Sve patnje ovih jadnih mornara Essexa mogle su se izbjeći da su odmah nakon napuštanja broda krenuli ravno prema Tahitiju. Ali, Melville kaže, "bojali su se kanibala." Pitanje je, zašto su se kanibala bojali više od vjerojatnosti da će umrijeti od gladi? Zašto ih je jedna priča ponijela više od druge priče? Ako pogledamo iz tog kuta, njihova priča je priča o čitanju. Pisac Vladimir Nabokov rekao je da je najbolji čitatelj spoj dvaju različitih temperamenata, umjetničkog i znanstvenog. Dobar čitatelj ima strast umjetnika, volju da se izgubi u priči, ali isto tako potrebna je i objektivnost znanstvenika koja umiruje i komplicira čitateljevu reakciju na priču. Očito mornari Essexa nisu imali problema s umjetničkim dijelom. Zamislili su mnogo različitih strašnih scenarija. Problem je bio što su poslušali krivu priču. Od svih priča koje su im strahovi napisali, reagirali su samo na onu najgrozniju, najživopisniju, onu koju je bilo najlakše zamisliti: kanibali. No, da su možda uspjeli pročitati svoje strahove poput znanstvenika, s više objektivnosti, poslušali bi manje nasilnu, ali vjerojatniju priču, priču o umiranju od gladi, i krenuli prema Tahitiju, kao što je to predložio i Melville.
And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth. Thank you. (Applause)
Kada bismo i mi probali čitati svoje strahove, možda bismo se manje zanosili onim najsočnijim pričama. Možda bismo provodili manje vremena brinući se o serijskim ubojicama i nesrećama, a više vremena brinući se o tišoj i sporijoj katastrofi koja nas čeka: tiho začepljivanje arterija, postupne promjene u klimi. Baš kao što su najdetaljnije priče u književnosti često i najbogatije, tako i naši najmanji strahovi mogu biti istiniti. Ako ih dobro pročitamo, naši strahovi su poklon naše mašte nama, vrsta svakodnevne vidovitosti, način da vidimo što može donijeti budućnost, dok još imamo vremena da utječemo na to kako će ta budućnost izgledati. Ispravno pročitani, strahovi nam mogu ponuditi nešto vrijedno, kao i naša omiljena književna djela: malo mudrosti, malo opažanja i inačicu one najnedostižnije stvari - istine. Hvala vam. (Pljesak)