I’m obsessed with this one line from Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project: “All fears are memories of other fears . . .”  I’m not quite through with the 294-page book yet, but I’m a good ways along.  This line was on page 68.  I need to get over it.

All fears are memories of other fears.  Hmm.

The Lazarus Project intertwines an imagined present with an actual past: the fictional Brik, a Bosnian immigrant, is an insecure writer — is there any other kind? — who journeys to Moldova to investigate the life and death of the real-life Lazarus Averbuch.  Lazarus, a survivor of a 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, was an immigrant in the United States.  In 1908, he went to the house of Chicago’s Chief of Police, George Shippy.  During this meeting, Shippy shot and killed Lazarus, later explaining that Lazarus was an anarchist.  Evidently, folks at the time had a big fear of anarchists, based on past experience . . . as in: All fears are memories of other fears.  The line applies to so much in the novel, from musings about war and prejudice, to history repeating itself.

The chapters alternate the story of Lazarus with the story of Brik’s travels in search of the story of Lazarus.   So we read Lazarus, then Brik, then Lazarus, then Brik, and so on, until the stories start to fuse – and the present actually intermingles with the past.  It’s a brilliant structural echo of both character and theme, told in prose that is often resonant.  I could cite a dozen graceful passages.  Yet, it’s that one damn line that haunts me: “All fears are memories of other fears . . .” And it doesn’t haunt me because of what it says about history, or because of how it reverberates with this beautiful novel’s subject matter.  No, no, no.  Crazy me, I’m caught in the practical application of it outside of the novel.

If all fears ARE memories of other fears, then what are the original fears?  How far back can we trace them?  Do babies have fear?  They certainly have need – screeching need – but is it based in fear?  They don’t seem frightened.

I am now up late — compulsively, involuntarily trying to trace my fears to the source memory.

Ok, so I  thought this one through: In my first conscious second yesterday, I flipped off the alarm and tumbled back into sleep for ten minutes, and then I jolted upright, fearing momentarily that I had slept through my first class.  Ok.  So I can trace that to oversleeping as a kid.  I think.  Maybe.  Or was that just the child’s fear of oversleeping, that commonest of nightmares?  Did I ever actually oversleep?  I don’t know.  I have no memory of it.

Then I analyzed this: Around 10 a.m. yesterday, I’m parked in front of my first class, yapping about thesis statements and surreptitiously checking my fly – just subtly brushing my finger against the wee zipper handle — because I’m afraid the zipper is down.  What fear am I remembering there?  I can’t say.  There was that time I gave a presentation to a room full of attentive colleagues, not realizing until hours later that my spiffy new suit pants had the window wide open.  I had stood up there with my Victoria Secrets on display and nobody had uttered a word.  What’s worse, I didn’t read my mistake in the crowd, didn’t sense any snickering or distraction or unease.  But still, my zipper checking wasn’t really a fear, or a memory of a fear; it was simply prudence based on a lesson learned.  Crap.  I’m getting nowhere.

If only Hemon had said: “SOME fears are memories of other fears.”  One qualifier, and I’d be asleep right now.  But instead, I am on a quest, a quest to follow this elegant idea through on a personal level.  I’m in love with the thought that we have primal, historical fears tingling through time, coming into this minute.  I guess that’s what books were meant to do: interrupt us, ricochet in our heads.  Ideas and language, and even humor, do ricochet in The Lazarus Project. That’s what they’re doing in my head right now, at 2 a.m.: ricochet, ricochet.  No worries. I’ll get all the sleep I need when I’m dead.

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