I am finding anxiety more and more fascinating.
Kierkegaard wrote in the 1844 treatise “The Concept of Anxiety:” ‘And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.’
Daniel Smith (Monkey Mind), goes on to say: ‘This could only have been written by someone who understood anxiety from the inside. Kierkegaard saw that although anxiety is experienced as a kind of all-encompassing nausea-he compared it to the dizziness that afflicts a person when he peers down into an abyss.”