Dan Hitchens

Sometimes it’s good to worry

Francis O’Gorman’s Worrying: A Literary and Cultural Guide finds not much hope for the human race — but at least worriers, being sensitive to others, apparently make good team mates

At last, a snappy pop philosophy book which offers to sort out absolutely none of your personal issues. If anything, it will make them worse. ‘There are,’ Francis O’Gorman admits, ‘serious problems for me with the ethics of writing on worry.’ Since words are the very stuff of worry, O’Gorman (himself a worrier) suspects that reading is unlikely to provide a cure. Sufferers would do better to contemplate the sublime balance of Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ (‘a glimpse of a world without fretfulness’) or listen to Bach’s contrapuntal fugues, in which ‘Everything, whatever happens, fits.’ But O’Gorman is not really here to dole out advice:

A while ago, I described this book as I was writing it to a friend. He listened patiently, and rather sceptically. He finally said: ‘Is it like, then, some kind of literary self-help book?’
No. It’s a kind of literary there’s-no-help book.

As with a lot of O’Gorman’s humour, you’re not sure how far the joke carries. Anxiety disorders, for one thing, aren’t especially funny. O’Gorman limits his scope to ‘everyday’ worrying rather than ‘debilitating and extreme fearfulness’. But he has clearly been influenced by the literature on mental illness, and he reflects on Andrew Solomon’s aphorism: ‘Depression is the flaw in love.’ Solomon meant that creatures who find meaning in connection will be vulnerable to the misery of disconnectedness. Analogously, for O’Gorman, worry is ‘a flaw in reason’. Worriers know better than anyone the limits of the reasoning mind. Having tried often enough to just think about this rationally, they can see that, behind supposedly remorseless logic, there is usually some hidden belief system. Our minds are not reasoning machines; we are driven by our commitments.

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