Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

Anticipating difficulties was one thing, but spinning horror stories to make my own flesh creep was terrible.

I began to see that all these particular fears, of falling, of meeting with violent behavior, of wildly improbable hazards, were only excuses for a fear I could not recognize. They were false messengers I decided, concealing anxieties of a quite different kind.

I felt, without quite knowing why, that I had made a significant advance. There had been no victory, the battle would be resumed another time, but I thought I had caught a glimpse of the enemy within and knew that it belonged not to the present or the future but to my own buried past. I had not overcome it, but in that one episode it had lost much of its power to overcome me.

it used to seem that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate "normality," to win acceptance by any false pretense, and my desperate betrayals of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core) that others were twisting and cracking under the same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of "all things counter, original, spare, strange."

For me this is a landscape and a time to bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger between meals.

"magic was simply experiencing something for the first time."

Where I had been, people and things were forced to show the real stuff they were made of, because the superficial could not survive the battering it got. I was used to the sound of life, roars of laughter, shouts of anger, whistles, catcalls, bargaining, argument and domestic squabble; to the sight and smell of animals; to old people sunning themselves.

It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change. They are so obviously designed to compensate for mortality. The old gods never had any truck with them.

Custom is the enemy of awareness, in individuals as much as in societies. It regularizes the fears and cravings of everyday life.