On Hannah Arendt's birthday, link in profile for her timeless meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. (If you crave something more substantive than Instagram, try the weekly Marginalian newsletter, free and ad-free 18 years running: themarginalian.org/newsletter)
On Hannah Arendt's birthday, link in profile for her timeless meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. (If you crave something more substantive than Instagram, try the weekly Marginalian newsletter, free and ad-free 18 years running: themarginalian.org/newsletter)
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Fear is when we let being scared stop us from doing what love requires of us.
It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
Two things we must therefore root out: fear of distress in the future and the memory of distress in the past. The one concerns me no longer. The other concerns me not yet.
Indeed, your world can break down precisely because you live on after the death of everything you love. This “death” can be much more painful and fearful than the prospect of your own death, not least because it is a death that you have to survive. Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to
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