'each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone'

Before leaving on this mission, many of the men in Colbert's platoon had said good-bye to one another by shaking hands or even by hugging. The formal farewells seemed odd considering that everyone was going to be shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped Humvees. The good-byes almost seemed an acknowledgment of the transformations that take place in combat. Friends who lolled around together during free time talking about bands, stupid Marine Corps rules and girlfriends' fine asses aren't really the same people anymore once they enter the battlefield.

[...]

This is not to say the terror goes away. It simply moves out from the twitching muscles and nerves in your body and takes up residence in your mind. If you feed it with morbid thoughts of all the terrible ways you could be maimed or die, it gets worse. It also gets worse if you think about pleasant things. Good memories or plans for the future just remind you how much you don't want to die or get hurt. It's best to shut down, to block everything out. But to reach that state, you have to almost give up being yourself. This is why, I believe, everyone said good-bye to each other yesterday before leaving on this mission. They would still be together, but they wouldn't really be seeing one another for a while, since each man would, in his own way, be sort of gone.

—Evan Wright, Generation Kill (2004)

John Henry Newman's Personal Terror

Discovering no external assurance that history was guided by the hand of God, he looked out upon society and saw suffering, disease, squalor, misery, men falling away from Christianity and not returning, the long procession of the world, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of Chaldaea and the chariots of Egypt, and he shrank away with a sensitive horror. This bogy of skepticism was no bogy; it was his personal terror, the dead hand which scrabbled at him in the night when his faith was sleeping.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)

'must one eternally suffer, or else eternally flee beauty?'

And now the profound depth of the sky dismays me; its purity irritates me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the whole spectacle revolt me ... Ah! must one eternally suffer, or else eternally flee beauty? Nature, pitiless sorceress, ever victorious rival, do let me be! Stop tempting my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome.

—Charles Baudelaire, "Artist's Confiteor," Paris Spleen (1869) (trans. Louise Varèse 1947)

'such helpless novices'

. . . how is it possible to live when after all the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist? . . . I did not manage to express all of my astonishment over the fact that men have had for thousands of years to deal with life (not to mention God), and yet towards these first most immediate problems strictly speaking, these only problems (for what else have we to do, today still and for how long to come?) they remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable. Isn't that incomprehensible?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Nov. 8, 1915, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 2, 1910–1926 (trans. Greene & Norton 1948)

'we have become accustomed to lesser things'

Sometimes I reflect on how heaven came to be and death: through our having distanced what is most precious to us, because there was still so much to do beforehand and because it was not secure with us busy people. Now times have elapsed over this, and we have become accustomed to lesser things. We no longer recognize that which is our own and are terrified by its extreme greatness. May that not be?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)

'a pert coxcomb'

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, he dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station — and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864) (trans. Garnett 1918)

'All men ... are born with halters round their necks.'

But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick ch. 60 (1851)

But it doesn't know that.

BEGGAR

See the smoke trembling under the roof as if with fright? Yet when it gets out in the air, it has the whole sky to swirl about in. But it doesn't know that, so it huddles and trembles in the soot under the roof. It's the same with people. They quiver like a leaf in the storm, afraid of what they know, and what they don't know.

—Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" ("Jungfrukällan") (1960) (screenplay by Ulla Isaksson; translation possibly by Lars Malmström & David Kushner)

Run with terror all before you

Starless are the nights of travel,
Bleak the winter wind;
Run with terror all before you
And regret behind.

Run until you hear the ocean's
Everlasting cry;
Deep though it may be and bitter
You must drink it dry.

—W.H. Auden, from "Lady, weeping at the crossroads," lines 9–16 (1940)