Anxiety is like a safety blanket, O’Kane argues, convincingly. It offers short-term relief from menacing thoughts, but as a coping mechanism it can be self-sabotaging. ‘I can guarantee that nothing will go wrong if you avoid that dinner-party. I can promise you that you won’t feel rejected if you don’t apply for that job….’ The problem is, the more hooked you become, the bigger the anxiety becomes, and you get caught in this almost circular loop. So we get addicted to anxiety because, paradoxically, it gives us a way of dealing with our fears. We just give in to them. The next time we’re scared, we’ll say to ourselves, ‘No, dinner-parties like that make me so anxious. But that’s OK, they just aren’t for me. I don’t have to go.’

The solution, of course, is a tough one. You have to say ‘No’ to fear. Accept it exists, but negotiate with it – say, ‘Thanks, but I don’t think on this occasion that staying in bed will be the long-term solution.’ Then gradually fear will lose its power over you.

It’s hard, but I’m sure O’Kane is right. My poor late mother was a case in point. By the time she was in her 80s she was so anxious about everything that she just sat at home, all the time – for about eight years. 

I resemble her in many ways. But for some time I’ve been so determined not to end up in her state of mind that I’ve developed the obverse problem. My Mum’s negative role model has instilled in me a philosophy that insists, if something scares me, I’ve got to do it. So for me, the trick is to sort out which of the scary things I really ought to be attempting, and which I can safely leave alone.  Confronting EVERY terror is probably too much. Years ago, when some of our neighbours were doing a parachute jump to raise funds for our local advice centre, I almost convinced myself that I was duty-bound to take part. I’m still glad that I didn’t. 

Yesterday evening a well-timed concert at the Wigmore Hall in London asked a question first posed by playwright Berthold Brecht in a motto attached to his Svenborg Poems: ‘In the dark times will there also be singing?’  He answered the question himself, in the affirmative: ‘Yes,’ he wrote, ‘there will be singing, About the dark times.’  The Poems were published in 1939. His close friend, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, agreed.  In the following year, in On the Concept of History, Benjamin warned us that, ‘the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that accords with this insight.’

All this seemed very appropriate on the day when Donald Trump was inaugurated as US President.  It was also ‘Blue Monday’, said to be the most depressing day of the year. 

But the concert, which featured the glorious voice of contralto Jess Dandy, with Dylan Perez on piano, presented some dissenting views of darkness. Not just a metaphor for times of tribulation, nor a necessary prelude to seasonal renewal, but also a recurring and diurnal reality which can shelter and sustain: something more akin to Heidegger’s conception of Earth, and ‘a fertile darkness of infinite potential.’ ( Jess Dandy and Dylan Perez, Programme Note, In the Dark Times will there be Singing?) The evening ended with some settings of poems from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours, composed by Alex Mills and translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.  

‘You, darkness, of whom I am born –

I love you more than flame

that limits the world 

to the circle it illumines

and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:

shapes and shadows,

creatures and me,

people, nations – just as they are.

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring 

beside me.

I believe in the night.