Brian Eckert

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

-Blaise Pascal

1.

Pascal argues that men avoid sitting alone in a room because they are naturally unhappy. He says that if our condition were truly happy, we would not need diversion from thinking of it in order to make ourselves happy. Without diversion, however, man has nothing to deflect thoughts of death, ignorance, grief—thoughts that arouse awareness of his feeble and mortal condition. To be happy, we must remain willfully ignorant of our condition by seeking “bustle, noise and stir…women, war, and high posts”. In a word, “the chase.”

The mistake in this thinking, according to Pascal, is not the seeking of excitement itself, but the belief that the objects of our quests would really make us happy. In this sense, all pursuits are vain. Human activity is merely a diversion from the human condition.

2.

Psychology recognizes two related phenomenon that might explain our aversion to sitting alone in a room with no distractions. Autophobia is an abnormal and persistent fear of loneliness, of being alone, of solitude. There is also monophobia, which can manifest as the fear of being alone at home. But I posit that there is another irrational fear—one not recognized by psychology or medical science—that can explain man’s fear of himself alone with himself. Let us call the condition abyssophobia—the fear of abysses.

Fear of abysses is the exact opposite of the fear of heights. It is a fear of depths—bottomless depths. A man who sits alone in a room dwells in the abyss, which is to say the emptiness of existence, the nothingness of being. He fears he may fall so deeply into himself that he never returns. Read the rest of this entry »