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."
Nekega dne, leta 1819, 4.828 km od čilske obale, v enem najbolj oddaljenih področij pacifiškega oceana je 20 ameriških mornarjev gledalo kako je njihovo ladjo zalila morska voda. Udaril jih je kit glavač in naredil ogromno luknjo v ladjinem trupu. Ko se je njihova ladja začela potapljati so se možje nagnetli skupaj v tri majhne rešilne čolne. Bili so 16.093 km od doma, več kot 1.609 km stran od najbližjega koščka kopnega. V svojih majhnih čolnih so imeli samo osnovno navigacijsko opremo in omejene zaloge hrane in vode. To so bili možje s kitolovke Essex, katerih zgodba je bila kasneje navdih za dele "Moby Dick-a".
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.
Celo v današnjem svetu bi bila njihova situacija zelo grozljiva, pomislite koliko težje je bilo šele takrat. Nihče na kopnem ni imel pojma, da je šlo kaj narobe. Nihče ni iskal teh mož. Torej, večina izmed nas se ni nikoli znašla v situaciji tako strašljivi kot je bila ta, v kateri so se znašli ti mornarji, toda vsi vemo kako je, če nas je strah. Vemo kako občutimo strah, vendar nisem prepričana, da dovolj časa razmišljamo o tem kaj naši strahovi pomenijo.
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?
Ko odraščamo, nas pogosto vzpodbujajo naj razmišljamo o strahu kot o slabosti, še eni otroški stvari, ki jo moramo opustiti, kot mlečne zobe in kotalke. In menim, da ni naključje, da tako razmišljamo. Nevrologi so namreč dokazali, da smo ljudje v osnovi optimisti. Torej, mogoče zato včasih razmišljamo o strahu samem kot o nevarnosti. "Ne skrbi" radi rečemo drug drugemu. "Ne paničari." V angleškem jeziku je strah nekaj kar premagamo, nekaj, s čimer se borimo. Nekaj kar obvladamo. Toda kaj ča bi na strah pogledali z novimi očmi? Kaj če bi strah videli kot osupljivo dejanje domišljije, nekaj kar je lahko tako globoko in pronicljivo kot pripovedovanje zgodb?
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?
Najlažje je videti to povezavo med strahom in domišljijo pri majhnih otrocih, katerih strahovi so pogosto izredno slikoviti. Ko sem bila otrok, sem živela v Kaliforniji, ki je, kot veste, praviloma zelo prijazen kraj za življenje. Toda zame, kot otroka, je bila Kalifornija tudi malo strašljiva. Spominjam se kako strašljivo je bilo videti lestenec, ki je visel nad mizo in se zibal sem ter tja med vsakim manjšim potresom. Včasih ponoči nisem mogla spati, saj me je bilo strah, da bo udaril Ta Velik, medtem ko bomo spali. In o otrocih, ki imajo takšne strahove, rečemo da imajo bujno domišljijo. Toda v določeni točki se večina izmed nas nauči, da te vrste predstave pustimo za seboj in odrastemo. Naučimo se, da se pod posteljo ne skrivajo pošasti in da vsak potres ne poruši poslopij. Toda mogoče ni naključje, da nekateri naši nabolj kreativni umi, ne uspejo pustiti teh vrst strahov za seboj ko odrastejo. Ista neverjetna domišljija, ki je rodila "O nastanku vrst", "Jane Eyre" in "Iskanje izgubljenega časa", je tudi vzbujala silne skrbi, ki so preganjali odrasla življenja Charles-a Darwin-a, Charlotte Bronte in Marcel-a Proust-a. Torej, vprašanje je, kaj se lahko mi naučimo o strahu od vizionarjev in majhnih otrok?
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.
Za trenutek se bomo vrnili v leto 1819, k situaciji, s katero se je soočala kitolovka Essex. Poglejmo strahove, ki jih je vzbujala njihova domišljija, ko so bili izgubljeni sredi Pacifika. Štiriindvajset ur je minilo odkar se je ladja prevrnila. Prišel je čas, da možje naredijo načrt, toda imeli so malo možnosti. V svoji navdušujoči pripovedi te katastrofe je Nathaniel Philbrick zapisal, da so bili ti možje tako daleč od kopnega kot bi bilo to mogoče kjerkoli na Zemlji. Vedeli so, da je najbližje otočje, ki ga lahko dosežejo Markeški otoki, 1.931 km stran. Toda slišali so strah vzbujajoče govorice. Slišali so, da so ti otoki in nekaj otokov v bližini naseljeni z ljudožerci. Možje so si torej predstavljali, da bodo prišli na obalo in bodo takoj ubiti, in ljudožerci jih bodo pojedli za večerjo. Drugi možen cilj so bili Havaji, toda zaradi letnega časa se je kapetan bal, da jih bodo ujele močne nevihte. Zadnja možnost je bila najdaljša in najtežja, in sicer pluti 2.414 km južno v upanju, da bi dosegli določene vetrove, ki bi jih na koncu potisnili proti obalam Južne Amerike. Toda zavedali so se, da bodo že zaradi razdalja tega potovanja, imeli težave z zalogami hrane in vode. Da jih pojedo ljudožerci, da jih bijejo nevihte, da umrejo od lakote preden dosežejo kopno. To so bili strahovi, ki so plesaili v domišljiji teh ubogih mož in kot se je kasneje izkazalo, strah ki so mu prisluhnili je odločal o tem ali bodo preživeli ali umrli.
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.
Te strahove bi prav lahko poimenovali tudi z drugim imenom. Kaj če bi jih namesto strahovi, poimenovali zgodbe? Ker strah je, če nekoliko pomislimo, pravzaprav v resnici neke vrste nenamerno pripovedovanje zgodbe in s tem znanjem smo vsi rojeni. Strahovi in pripovedovanje zgodb imata enake sestavne dele. Imajo enako arhiitekturo. Kot vse zgodbe imajo strahovi igralce. V naših strahovih smo igralci mi sami. Strahovi imajo tudi zaplet. Vkrcaš se na letalo. Letalo vzleti. Motor odpove. Naši strahovi imajo praviloma tudi metaforiko, ki je lahko enako slikovita kot jo lahko najdemo na straneh romana. Predstavljajte si ljudožerca, človeški zobje se zasadijo v človeško kožo, človeško meso se peče nad ognjem. Strahovi nas tudi držijo v napetost. Če sem danes opravila svoje delo kot pripovedovalka zgodbe, bi se morali sedaj spraševati kaj se je zgodilo z možmi s kitolovke Essex. Naši strahovi v nas vzbudijo zelo podobno napetost. Prav tako kot vse velike zgodbe, se naši strahovi osredotočajo na vprašanje, ki je ravno tako pomembno v življenju kot v literaturi: Kaj se bo zgodilo? Z drugimi besedami, naši strahovi nas silijo, da razmišljamo o prihodnosti. In, mimgrede, ljudje smo edina bitja sposobna razmišljati o prihodnosti na način, da si sami sebe predstavljamo v prihodnosti. In to miselno potovanje v času je samo še ena stvar, ki je skupna strahovom in pripovedovanju zgodb.
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.
Kot pisateljica vam lahko povem, da je velik del pisanja leposlovja znati predvidevati kako bo en dogodek zgodbe vplival na vse ostale dogodke. In strah deluje na podoben način. Pri strahu, ravno tako kot v leposlovju, ena stvar vodi k drugi. Ko sem pisala svoj prvi roman "Leto čudežev", sem več mesecev poskušala ugotoviti kaj se bo zgodilo, če bi se Zemlja naenkrat začela vrteti počasneje. Kaj bi se zgodilo z našimi dnevi? Kaj bi se zgodilo z našo letino? Kaj bi se zgodilo z našim razumom? In šele kasneje sem se zavedla kako zelo podobna so bila ta vprašanja tistim, ki sem si jih zastavljala kot prestrašen otrok v noči. Skrbelo me je, kaj če nas potres strese nocoj, kaj se bo zgodilo z našo hišo? Kaj se bo zgodilo z našo družino? In odgovor na ta vprašanja je vedno imel obilko zgodbe. Torej, če o svojih strahovih razmišljamo ne le kot o strahovih ampak kot o zgodbah, bi morali o sebi razmišljati kot o avtorjih teh zgodb. In ravno tako pomembno, o sebi moramo razmišljati kot o bralcih svojih strahov. In to, kako se odločimo, da bomo svoje strahove brali, ima močan učinek na naša življenja.
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.
Nekateri izmed nas že po naravi bolj natančno berejo svoje strahove kot drugi. Pred kratkim sem brala raziskavo o uspešnih podjetnikih, v kateri je avtor ugotovil, da imajo ti ljudje skupno navado, ki jo je poimenoval "produktivna paranoja", kar pomeni, da ti ljudje, namesto da bi zavračali svoje strahove, jih natančno berejo, jih preučujejo in nato ta strah pretvorijo v pripravljenost in akcijo. Na tak način, če se njihovi najhujši strahovi uresničijo, so njihova podjetja pripravljena.
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.
In včasih se naši najhujši strahovi uresničijo. To je ena izmed stvari, ki je tako nenavadna pri strahu. Vsake toliko časa lahko naši strahovi napovedo prihodnost. Toda nikakor se ne moremo pripraviti na vse naše strahove, ki jih naša domošljija lahko skuje. Torej, kako lahko ločimo med strahovi, katerim je vredno prisluhniti in med vsemi drugimi strahovi? Menim, da konec zgodbe o kitolovki Essex ponudi poučen, čeravno tragičen primer. Po temeljitem razmisleku, so se možje končno odločili. Ker so se bali ljudožercev, so se odločili, da bodo pluli mimo najbližjih otokov in se namesto tega podali na daljšo in veliko težjo pot do Južne Amerike. In po več kot dveh mesecih na morju, jim je zmanjkalo hrane, kar so sicer lahko pričakovali. Še vedno pa so bili daleč od kopnega. Ko sta zadnje preživele končno rešili dve ladji, ki sta pluli mimo, jih je bilo le še manj kot polovica. In nekateri izmed njih so se zatekli k svoji obliki ljudožerstva. Herman Melville, ki je to zgodbo uporabil pri pisanju "Moby Dick-a", je nekaj let kasneje, na trdni zemlji, zapisal "Vsemu trpljenju teh nesrečnih mož iz Essex-a bi se lahko izognili, če bi se, takoj ko so zapustili potopljeno ladjo obrnili naravnost proti Tahitiju. Toda", kakor pravi Melville: "groza jih je bilo ljudožercev." Vprašanje je torej, zakaj so se ti možje bolj močno bali ljudožercev, kot velike verjetnosti, da bodo umrli od lakote? Zakaj je ena zgodba močneje vplivala nanje kot druga? Če pogledamo z druge strani njihva zgodba postane zgodba o branju. Romanopisec Vladimir Nabokov je dejal, da ima najboljši bralec kombinacijo dveh različnih temperamentov, in sicer umetniški in znanstveni. Dober bralec ima umetniško strast, voljnost, da se ujame v zgodbo. Pa ravno tako pomembno, bralec tudi potrebuje razsodnost znanstvenika ki ublaži in zaplete bralčev intuitiven odziv na zgodbo. Kot smo videli, možje z Essexa niso imeli težav z umetniškim delom. Izmislili so si različne grozljive scenarije. Težava je bila v tem, da so prisluhnili napačni zgodbi. Od vseh zgodb, ki so jih spisali njihovi strahovi, so se odzvali samo na najbolj šokantno in najbolj slikovito. Tisto, ki si jo je njihova domišljija najlažje predstavljala: ljudožerci. Toda mogoče, če bi lahko svoje strahove brali bolj kot znanstvenik, z več razsodnosti, bi prisluhnili manj nasilni, a bolj verjetni zgodbi, zgodbi o smrti zaradi lakote in se usmerili proti Tahitiju, tako kot predlaga žalosten Melvill-ov komentar.
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)
In mogoče, če bi vsi poskusili brati svoje strahove, bi najbolj veliki strahovi manj pogosto vplivali na nas. Mogoče bi zato manj časa skrbeli o serijskih morilcih in letalskih nesrečah, in bi se več časa ukvarjali z bolj subtilnimi in počasnejšimi katastrofami, s katerimi se soočamo: tiho kopičenje oblog v naših arterijah, počasne spremembe našega podnebja. Ravno tako kot so najbolj niansne zgodbe v literaturi pogosto najbogatejše, tako so lahko naši nabolj subtilni strahovi najresničnejši. Če jih beremo na pravi način, so naši strahovi osupljivo darilo domišljije, neke vrste vsakdanja jasnovidnost, način za hiter pogled v to, kaj nam lahko prinese prihodnost. In to takrat, ko je še čas, da vplivamo na to, kako se bo prihodnost odvila. Če jih pravilno beremo, nam naši strahovi lahko ponudijo nekaj tako dragocenega kot naša literarna dela: malo modrosti, nekaj uvida in različico najbolj izmuzljive stvari -- resnice. Hvala. (Ploskanje)