July 2007
Intermediate to advanced
194 pages
4h 6m
English
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
–PLATO
Anxiety. Everybody has it. Nobody loves it. Mel Brooks made a movie about it, High Anxiety (1977). W. H. Auden wrote a long poem, “The Age of Anxiety” (1947), set in a New York bar. Leonard Bernstein adopted Auden’s title for his Symphony No. 2 (1948). We are wallowing in anxiety, generalized, unfocused, nonspecific, and—our favorite term—free-floating, a kind of nervous cloud on which we depart the present in a sour mood for a place we’d rather not be. When we put the word anxiety into Google, we got 112 million hits in 0.07 second. That’s a lot of free-floating anxiety in cyberspace.
This chapter has twin themes ...
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