Whenever he feels vaguely guilty over his inertia, or whenever his wife reproaches him for his lack of ambition and
nags him to demand a raise, he responds by summoning the thought that he is a "decent citizen," a "good provider,"
a "devoted, faithful husband," a "God-fearing man,'' and that he has done all the things "one is supposed to do."
Whenever he feels a surge of envy or hostility toward those men around him who have made more of their lives
than he has, he tells himself that his cardinal virtue is humility—and that people are at fault in not recognizing this
and giving him the respect he deserves. It is thus that he makes his existence tolerable psychologically.
At the hardware store, he performs the routine tasks he has been taught, initiating nothing, learning nothing,
thinking nothing. But occasionally he dreams of the higher income and enhanced prestige he will enjoy when his
uncle dies and leaves him the business; if the moral implications of his wish rise to trouble them, he promptly
unfocuses his mind and thus eludes them.
However, when the longed-for event finally happens, he does not experience the elation he had imagined. A day
after his uncle's funeral, he awakens in the middle of the night, his heart pounding frantically, in a state of acute
dread. He does not know how to account for it; he knows only that he feels overwhelmed by a sense of impending
disaster.
The evasion and self-deception which have been habitual since childhood, now forbid him to know the meaning of
his anxiety. For years, he had been shrinking his perception—and the dimensions of the world with which he had to
deal—in order to avoid coming face to face with his moral and psychological default, and to escape any potential
threat to his precarious inner "security." He has crawled through his life, accepting, nodding, agreeing, obeying,
seeking to bypass the effort and responsibility of thought by making humility his means of survival, seeking to
establish for himself a world in which this would be possible. But now reality has demolished the walls of that
world, he has been thrown into a situation where intellectual responsibility will be demanded of him, where he will
have to exercise judgment. Two thoughts have collided within him: "I've got to know what to do!" and "I can't!" In
response to this collision, the chronic fear he had always evaded explodes into terror—the terror