Car Crash

 Today on the road, on what was supposed to be the second and final day of my drive home, I caught a wind gust at some point on the highway through Indiana, and it sent my car drifting across the ice. I felt the wheels lose traction on the road just slightly, and realized I was sliding out of my lane. I overcorrected for it (or something), and I suddenly found myself swerving in the other direction. Then I swerved back, and realized the car was now entirely out of my control. 

"This is it," I thought. "So this is what this feels like. I always wondered." In some sense, I became a detached observer. "Oh interesting," I thought. "This is losing control of the car. This is what that feels like. I've heard of this." Then I slammed into the guard rail and the airbag blew. The car was totaled; but I was okay. 

Tomas Tranströmer has a poem about losing control of his car on an icy road in Scandinavia. He talks about how his present reality shrank away from him. His whole adulthood, everything about his personal identity, fell away, leaving only his naked vulnerability before the verdict of chance. 

It felt that way for me as well in some ways, but not in others. I had the same feeling of dissociation—the sense that I was both the observer of the moment as well as the experiencer of it. 

But there was not the sense of childlike helplessness that the poet describes (at least not during the accident itself—that came later, when I was standing on the side of the highway shivering in the blizzard, with massive semi-trucks roaring inches away from me down the same stretch of road that I had just discovered to be perilously slick). Instead, I felt strangely calm. "This is happening," I remember thinking. "I lost control; no help for it now. Now I just see how this plays out." 

A friend complimented me on my unusual sang-froid during the accident (at least as I reconstructed it for him while the memory was still fresh). And it's true that I did not feel any panic while the car was spinning out of control and heading for the guard rail. My friend suggested it's because I'm naturally an observer of things, including of myself. But I think the true answer has something to do with the fate of the fearful person. 

I lived several years of my life under the shadow of a panic disorder, after all. I have been, if I am not still, characterized as an anxious and fretful person. And I maintain that the paradox of such a trait is that the constant fear of danger in ordinary non-threatening circumstances ensures that one will be curiously untroubled by actual danger when it finally appears. 

Years ago, in reflecting on my struggles with panic disorder, I cited a remarkable anecdote that appears in Peter Gay's biography of Freud. The father of psychoanalysis was walking one day with William James, when the latter suffered a minor heart attack that put him in imminent fear of death. Yet, alarming as the incident was, James met it with astonishing Stoicism. He clutched his chest, steadied himself for a moment, then strode forward as if nothing had happened. Freud was amazed by his calm in the face of the fleeting brush of death's wing he had just witnessed. 

What is particularly remarkable about this anecdote is that James comes across in his writings as a man morbidly afraid of death. The whole section on the "Sick Soul" in his Varieties is one long meditation on the terror and melancholy of personal annihilation and non-existence. James was a man deathly afraid of mortality. And yet, when death actually brushed past him, he was unperturbed. 

The reason, I posit, is that it is precisely because James spent so many of his normal waking hours worrying about death that an actual encounter with it could not move him. The genuine appearance of death struck him as normal; a familiar companion or nuisance had just stopped by. In fact, what was more unnerving to him was the blithe indifference with which people in ordinary life treated the impending doom we all face. To finally encounter death in person, to find it intruding during a peaceful walk in the woods, by contrast, could only seem a relief—here, finally, is the true nature of reality showing itself; here is how I always knew things to be. What a relief to see it being acknowledged again!

It's the same condition that A.E. Housman talks about, in a poem I've quoted before in this context. In one of his verses in A Shropshire Lad, he contrasts the gloomy pessimism of his poetry with the "light and fleeting" thoughts of others. He observes that the thoughts of others may be as sunny as they like, but that the advantage of his darker thoughts is that "mine were of trouble/And mine were steady/So I was ready/When trouble came." So too with William James. His thoughts were of death, and his were steady—so should we be surprised to hear that he was also ready, when it nearly came? 

 So too I flatter myself that there is at least one slim silver lining to be found in having lived for several years with panic disorder. Someone who experiences fear over perfectly safe things in ordinary life might be expected to be sent into even greater emotional turmoil by an actual danger, but very often, the opposite is the case, for precisely the reason we have just described. You could say that my thoughts were of danger, and mine were steady, so I was ready, when danger came. Or something like that. 

After all, if you feel that the world is full of lurking shadows, it seems reassuringly natural if they happen to reveal themselves. I am reminded of an episode that occurs toward the beginning of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, in which the protagonist loses control of his car on an icy road and it completes a full about-face turn after sliding on the highway. He is suddenly reminded in that moment of a line from Milton: "millions of creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep." 

For some of us, that is to say, a sudden near-death experience feels like an encounter with the forces we always knew to be there, but which are ordinarily kept hidden, just out of view. 

Or maybe it's none of this—and maybe the sang-froid is simply what we all feel, when we have lost control of a vehicle, or of our bodies, and realized that—precisely because we are no longer in control—we no longer need to struggle. As a character in Cormac McCarthy's Stella Maris says: "climbers who have fallen to what they believed to be their deaths universally report calm and acceptance," such as I felt in the car as I was skidding toward the barrier. "Why is that?" the dialogue in the novel continues. "I don't know," she replies; "I think it's because there's no decision to be made." Precisely.