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One day in 1819,

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3,000 miles off the coast of Chile,

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in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean,

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20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater.

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They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped

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a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull.

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As their ship began to sink beneath the swells,

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the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.

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These men were 10,000 miles from home,

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more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land.

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In their small boats, they carried only

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rudimentary navigational equipment

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and limited supplies of food and water.

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These were the men of the whaleship Essex,

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whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."

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Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire,

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but think about how much worse it would have been then.

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No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong.

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No search party was coming to look for these men.

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So most of us have never experienced a situation

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as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves,

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but we all know what it's like to be afraid.

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We know how fear feels,

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but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about

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what our fears mean.

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As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear

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as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard

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like baby teeth or roller skates.

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And I think it's no accident that we think this way.

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Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings

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are hard-wired to be optimists.

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So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes,

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as a danger in and of itself.

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"Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic."

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In English, fear is something we conquer.

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It's something we fight. It's something we overcome.

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But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?

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What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination,

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something that can be as profound and insightful

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as storytelling itself?

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It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination

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in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.

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When I was a child, I lived in California,

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which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live,

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but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary.

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I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier

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that hung above our dining table swing back and forth

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during every minor earthquake,

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and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified

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that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.

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And what we say about kids who have fears like that

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is that they have a vivid imagination.

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But at a certain point, most of us learn

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to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up.

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We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed,

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and not every earthquake brings buildings down.

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But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds

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fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults.

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The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species,"

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"Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past,"

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also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives

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of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust.

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So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear

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from visionaries and young children?

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Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment,

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to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex.

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Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations

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were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific.

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Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship.

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The time had come for the men to make a plan,

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but they had very few options.

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In his fascinating account of the disaster,

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Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about

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as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth.

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The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach

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were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.

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But they'd heard some frightening rumors.

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They'd been told that these islands,

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and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals.

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So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered

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and eaten for dinner.

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Another possible destination was Hawaii,

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but given the season, the captain was afraid

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they'd be struck by severe storms.

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Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult:

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to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching

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a certain band of winds that could eventually

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push them toward the coast of South America.

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But they knew that the sheer length of this journey

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would stretch their supplies of food and water.

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To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms,

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to starve to death before reaching land.

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These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men,

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and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to

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would govern whether they lived or died.

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Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name.

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What if instead of calling them fears,

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we called them stories?

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Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it.

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It's a kind of unintentional storytelling

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that we are all born knowing how to do.

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And fears and storytelling have the same components.

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They have the same architecture.

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Like all stories, fears have characters.

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In our fears, the characters are us.

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Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends.

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You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails.

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Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be

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every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel.

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Picture a cannibal, human teeth

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sinking into human skin,

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human flesh roasting over a fire.

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Fears also have suspense.

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If I've done my job as a storyteller today,

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you should be wondering what happened

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to the men of the whaleship Essex.

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Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense.

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Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention

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on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature:

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What will happen next?

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In other words, our fears make us think about the future.

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And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable

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of thinking about the future in this way,

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of projecting ourselves forward in time,

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and this mental time travel is just one more thing

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that fears have in common with storytelling.

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As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction

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is learning to predict how one event in a story

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will affect all the other events,

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and fear works in that same way.

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In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another.

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When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles,"

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I spent months trying to figure out what would happen

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if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down.

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What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops?

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What would happen to our minds?

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And then it was only later that I realized how very similar

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these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself

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as a child frightened in the night.

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If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry,

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what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family?

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And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story.

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So if we think of our fears as more than just fears

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but as stories, we should think of ourselves

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as the authors of those stories.

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But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves

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as the readers of our fears, and how we choose

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to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.

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Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others.

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I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs,

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and the author found that these people shared a habit

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that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that

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these people, instead of dismissing their fears,

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these people read them closely, they studied them,

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and then they translated that fear into preparation and action.

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So that way, if their worst fears came true,

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their businesses were ready.

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And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true.

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That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear.

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Once in a while, our fears can predict the future.

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But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears

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that our imaginations concoct.

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So how can we tell the difference between

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the fears worth listening to and all the others?

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I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex

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offers an illuminating, if tragic, example.

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After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision.

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Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands

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and instead embarked on the longer

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and much more difficult route to South America.

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After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food

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as they knew they might,

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and they were still quite far from land.

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When the last of the survivors were finally picked up

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by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive,

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and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism.

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Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick,"

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wrote years later, and from dry land, quote,

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"All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex

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might in all human probability have been avoided

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had they, immediately after leaving the wreck,

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steered straight for Tahiti.

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But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals."

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So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals

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so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation?

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Why were they swayed by one story

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so much more than the other?

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Looked at from this angle,

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theirs becomes a story about reading.

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The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader

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has a combination of two very different temperaments,

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the artistic and the scientific.

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A good reader has an artist's passion,

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a willingness to get caught up in the story,

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but just as importantly, the readers also needs

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the coolness of judgment of a scientist,

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which acts to temper and complicate

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the reader's intuitive reactions to the story.

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As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part.

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They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios.

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The problem was that they listened to the wrong story.

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Of all the narratives their fears wrote,

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they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid,

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the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture:

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cannibals.

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But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears

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more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment,

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they would have listened instead to the less violent

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but the more likely tale, the story of starvation,

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and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.

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And maybe if we all tried to read our fears,

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we too would be less often swayed

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by the most salacious among them.

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Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about

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serial killers and plane crashes,

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and more time concerned with the subtler

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and slower disasters we face:

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the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries,

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the gradual changes in our climate.

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Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest,

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so too might our subtlest fears be the truest.

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Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift

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of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance,

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a way of glimpsing what might be the future

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when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

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Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious

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as our favorite works of literature:

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a little wisdom, a bit of insight

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and a version of that most elusive thing --

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the truth.

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Thank you. (Applause)