Fear and not fearing

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There is no fear in the world that a man would not gladly take upon himself in an effort to avoid not-fearing. Man cannot endure fear, but even greater still he subtly senses that he would lose everything in a single revolutionary moment of catastrophic non-fear. Thus man is more afraid of not-fearing than he is of fear. For man is exclusively fear. To be not afraid is tantamount to not being, for fear invents the coward. To be not afraid? No, none have the courage to imagine it.

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These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.