'Hence it is true that if our apprehensions make us seek deliverance, yet it is they which keep us from achieving it. Though he dreads the future to the point of making it the sole object of his preoccupations, the anxious man is a prisoner of the past; he is, in fact, the only man who really has a past. His tribulations, of which he is the slave, move him forward only to yank him back. He comes thereby to regret the raw, anonymous fear from which everything starts, the fear that is beginning, origin, principle of everything alive. Terrible as it is, such fear is nonetheless endurable, since whatever lives resigns itself to it. It lacerates and ravages the living--it does not annihilate them. Such is not the case with this refined fear, this "recent" fear posterior to the appearance of the self, in which the diffuse, omnipresent danger is never materialized, a reflexive fear which, for lack of other nourishment, devours itself.'  --* M Cioran, The N*w Gods (tr Howard, 1974)