WEBVTT 00:00:00.419 --> 00:00:02.765 One day in 1819, 00:00:02.765 --> 00:00:05.524 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, 00:00:05.524 --> 00:00:08.454 in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 00:00:08.454 --> 00:00:12.494 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. 00:00:12.494 --> 00:00:14.674 They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped 00:00:14.674 --> 00:00:17.575 a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull. 00:00:17.575 --> 00:00:19.904 As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, 00:00:19.904 --> 00:00:24.217 the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. 00:00:24.217 --> 00:00:26.480 These men were 10,000 miles from home, 00:00:26.480 --> 00:00:29.703 more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. 00:00:29.703 --> 00:00:31.907 In their small boats, they carried only 00:00:31.907 --> 00:00:33.473 rudimentary navigational equipment 00:00:33.473 --> 00:00:37.121 and limited supplies of food and water. 00:00:37.121 --> 00:00:39.325 These were the men of the whaleship Essex, 00:00:39.325 --> 00:00:41.980 whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:41.980 --> 00:00:44.929 Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, 00:00:44.929 --> 00:00:46.855 but think about how much worse it would have been then. 00:00:46.855 --> 00:00:50.080 No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. 00:00:50.080 --> 00:00:52.992 No search party was coming to look for these men. 00:00:52.992 --> 00:00:55.854 So most of us have never experienced a situation 00:00:55.854 --> 00:00:59.357 as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, 00:00:59.357 --> 00:01:01.224 but we all know what it's like to be afraid. 00:01:01.224 --> 00:01:03.518 We know how fear feels, 00:01:03.518 --> 00:01:05.622 but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about 00:01:05.622 --> 00:01:07.267 what our fears mean. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:07.267 --> 00:01:10.104 As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear 00:01:10.104 --> 00:01:13.017 as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard 00:01:13.017 --> 00:01:15.835 like baby teeth or roller skates. 00:01:15.835 --> 00:01:18.330 And I think it's no accident that we think this way. 00:01:18.330 --> 00:01:20.937 Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings 00:01:20.937 --> 00:01:23.676 are hard-wired to be optimists. 00:01:23.676 --> 00:01:26.459 So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, 00:01:26.459 --> 00:01:28.437 as a danger in and of itself. 00:01:28.437 --> 00:01:31.434 "Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic." 00:01:31.434 --> 00:01:34.083 In English, fear is something we conquer. 00:01:34.083 --> 00:01:37.916 It's something we fight. It's something we overcome. 00:01:37.916 --> 00:01:40.121 But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? 00:01:40.121 --> 00:01:44.264 What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, 00:01:44.264 --> 00:01:46.642 something that can be as profound and insightful 00:01:46.642 --> 00:01:49.296 as storytelling itself? NOTE Paragraph 00:01:49.296 --> 00:01:51.889 It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination 00:01:51.889 --> 00:01:55.168 in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid. 00:01:55.168 --> 00:01:57.449 When I was a child, I lived in California, 00:01:57.449 --> 00:02:00.138 which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, 00:02:00.138 --> 00:02:04.146 but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. 00:02:04.146 --> 00:02:07.187 I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier 00:02:07.187 --> 00:02:09.620 that hung above our dining table swing back and forth 00:02:09.620 --> 00:02:11.795 during every minor earthquake, 00:02:11.795 --> 00:02:14.098 and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified 00:02:14.098 --> 00:02:16.619 that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping. 00:02:16.619 --> 00:02:19.491 And what we say about kids who have fears like that 00:02:19.491 --> 00:02:22.719 is that they have a vivid imagination. 00:02:22.719 --> 00:02:25.109 But at a certain point, most of us learn 00:02:25.109 --> 00:02:27.995 to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up. 00:02:27.995 --> 00:02:30.752 We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, 00:02:30.752 --> 00:02:33.732 and not every earthquake brings buildings down. 00:02:33.732 --> 00:02:37.140 But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds 00:02:37.140 --> 00:02:40.251 fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. 00:02:40.251 --> 00:02:44.112 The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species," 00:02:44.112 --> 00:02:46.969 "Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past," 00:02:46.969 --> 00:02:50.308 also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives 00:02:50.308 --> 00:02:54.764 of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust. 00:02:54.764 --> 00:02:57.693 So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear 00:02:57.693 --> 00:03:00.997 from visionaries and young children? NOTE Paragraph 00:03:00.997 --> 00:03:03.857 Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, 00:03:03.857 --> 00:03:07.544 to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex. 00:03:07.544 --> 00:03:09.663 Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations 00:03:09.663 --> 00:03:13.419 were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific. 00:03:13.419 --> 00:03:16.968 Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship. 00:03:16.968 --> 00:03:19.671 The time had come for the men to make a plan, 00:03:19.671 --> 00:03:22.397 but they had very few options. 00:03:22.397 --> 00:03:24.828 In his fascinating account of the disaster, 00:03:24.828 --> 00:03:27.568 Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about 00:03:27.568 --> 00:03:31.968 as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. 00:03:31.968 --> 00:03:34.268 The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach 00:03:34.268 --> 00:03:38.044 were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. 00:03:38.044 --> 00:03:40.566 But they'd heard some frightening rumors. 00:03:40.566 --> 00:03:42.244 They'd been told that these islands, 00:03:42.244 --> 00:03:46.488 and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. 00:03:46.488 --> 00:03:48.864 So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered 00:03:48.864 --> 00:03:50.505 and eaten for dinner. 00:03:50.505 --> 00:03:53.257 Another possible destination was Hawaii, 00:03:53.257 --> 00:03:55.129 but given the season, the captain was afraid 00:03:55.129 --> 00:03:58.350 they'd be struck by severe storms. 00:03:58.350 --> 00:04:02.142 Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: 00:04:02.142 --> 00:04:05.766 to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching 00:04:05.766 --> 00:04:07.655 a certain band of winds that could eventually 00:04:07.655 --> 00:04:09.919 push them toward the coast of South America. 00:04:09.919 --> 00:04:12.640 But they knew that the sheer length of this journey 00:04:12.640 --> 00:04:16.151 would stretch their supplies of food and water. 00:04:16.151 --> 00:04:19.557 To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, 00:04:19.557 --> 00:04:22.918 to starve to death before reaching land. 00:04:22.918 --> 00:04:26.310 These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, 00:04:26.310 --> 00:04:29.209 and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to 00:04:29.209 --> 00:04:31.863 would govern whether they lived or died. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:31.863 --> 00:04:36.073 Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. 00:04:36.073 --> 00:04:38.351 What if instead of calling them fears, 00:04:38.351 --> 00:04:39.962 we called them stories? 00:04:39.962 --> 00:04:42.195 Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it. 00:04:42.195 --> 00:04:45.255 It's a kind of unintentional storytelling 00:04:45.255 --> 00:04:48.185 that we are all born knowing how to do. 00:04:48.185 --> 00:04:50.948 And fears and storytelling have the same components. 00:04:50.948 --> 00:04:52.813 They have the same architecture. 00:04:52.813 --> 00:04:55.490 Like all stories, fears have characters. 00:04:55.490 --> 00:04:57.913 In our fears, the characters are us. 00:04:57.913 --> 00:05:02.215 Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. 00:05:02.215 --> 00:05:06.331 You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. 00:05:06.331 --> 00:05:08.899 Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be 00:05:08.899 --> 00:05:12.248 every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel. 00:05:12.248 --> 00:05:15.204 Picture a cannibal, human teeth 00:05:15.204 --> 00:05:17.411 sinking into human skin, 00:05:17.411 --> 00:05:20.465 human flesh roasting over a fire. 00:05:20.465 --> 00:05:23.201 Fears also have suspense. 00:05:23.201 --> 00:05:25.491 If I've done my job as a storyteller today, 00:05:25.491 --> 00:05:26.999 you should be wondering what happened 00:05:26.999 --> 00:05:29.100 to the men of the whaleship Essex. 00:05:29.100 --> 00:05:33.345 Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense. 00:05:33.345 --> 00:05:36.898 Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention 00:05:36.898 --> 00:05:40.837 on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: 00:05:40.837 --> 00:05:43.594 What will happen next? 00:05:43.594 --> 00:05:46.298 In other words, our fears make us think about the future. 00:05:46.298 --> 00:05:48.316 And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable 00:05:48.316 --> 00:05:49.986 of thinking about the future in this way, 00:05:49.986 --> 00:05:52.877 of projecting ourselves forward in time, 00:05:52.877 --> 00:05:55.289 and this mental time travel is just one more thing 00:05:55.289 --> 00:05:58.911 that fears have in common with storytelling. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:58.911 --> 00:06:01.404 As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction 00:06:01.404 --> 00:06:03.287 is learning to predict how one event in a story 00:06:03.287 --> 00:06:05.031 will affect all the other events, 00:06:05.031 --> 00:06:07.080 and fear works in that same way. 00:06:07.080 --> 00:06:12.257 In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another. 00:06:12.257 --> 00:06:14.903 When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," 00:06:14.903 --> 00:06:17.864 I spent months trying to figure out what would happen 00:06:17.864 --> 00:06:21.053 if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down. 00:06:21.053 --> 00:06:23.945 What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops? 00:06:23.945 --> 00:06:25.988 What would happen to our minds? 00:06:25.988 --> 00:06:29.094 And then it was only later that I realized how very similar 00:06:29.094 --> 00:06:31.215 these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself 00:06:31.215 --> 00:06:33.452 as a child frightened in the night. 00:06:33.452 --> 00:06:35.983 If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, 00:06:35.983 --> 00:06:39.849 what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family? 00:06:39.849 --> 00:06:44.549 And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story. 00:06:44.549 --> 00:06:47.052 So if we think of our fears as more than just fears 00:06:47.052 --> 00:06:49.979 but as stories, we should think of ourselves 00:06:49.979 --> 00:06:52.210 as the authors of those stories. 00:06:52.210 --> 00:06:54.172 But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves 00:06:54.172 --> 00:06:56.676 as the readers of our fears, and how we choose 00:06:56.676 --> 00:07:01.011 to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:01.011 --> 00:07:04.012 Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. 00:07:04.012 --> 00:07:06.933 I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, 00:07:06.933 --> 00:07:09.559 and the author found that these people shared a habit 00:07:09.559 --> 00:07:12.918 that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that 00:07:12.918 --> 00:07:15.439 these people, instead of dismissing their fears, 00:07:15.439 --> 00:07:18.102 these people read them closely, they studied them, 00:07:18.102 --> 00:07:21.702 and then they translated that fear into preparation and action. 00:07:21.702 --> 00:07:23.619 So that way, if their worst fears came true, 00:07:23.619 --> 00:07:25.697 their businesses were ready. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:25.697 --> 00:07:30.048 And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. 00:07:30.048 --> 00:07:33.207 That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear. 00:07:33.207 --> 00:07:38.129 Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. 00:07:38.129 --> 00:07:41.524 But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears 00:07:41.524 --> 00:07:43.922 that our imaginations concoct. 00:07:43.922 --> 00:07:45.906 So how can we tell the difference between 00:07:45.906 --> 00:07:49.726 the fears worth listening to and all the others? 00:07:49.726 --> 00:07:52.203 I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex 00:07:52.203 --> 00:07:56.486 offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. 00:07:56.486 --> 00:08:01.213 After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. 00:08:01.213 --> 00:08:05.086 Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands 00:08:05.086 --> 00:08:07.413 and instead embarked on the longer 00:08:07.413 --> 00:08:10.540 and much more difficult route to South America. 00:08:10.540 --> 00:08:14.010 After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food 00:08:14.010 --> 00:08:15.089 as they knew they might, 00:08:15.089 --> 00:08:17.784 and they were still quite far from land. 00:08:17.784 --> 00:08:20.671 When the last of the survivors were finally picked up 00:08:20.671 --> 00:08:25.157 by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, 00:08:25.157 --> 00:08:30.060 and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. 00:08:30.060 --> 00:08:33.423 Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick," 00:08:33.423 --> 00:08:37.303 wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, 00:08:37.303 --> 00:08:39.927 "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex 00:08:39.927 --> 00:08:42.616 might in all human probability have been avoided 00:08:42.616 --> 00:08:45.183 had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, 00:08:45.183 --> 00:08:47.064 steered straight for Tahiti. 00:08:47.064 --> 00:08:51.629 But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals." 00:08:51.629 --> 00:08:54.675 So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals 00:08:54.675 --> 00:08:58.864 so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation? 00:08:58.864 --> 00:09:00.731 Why were they swayed by one story 00:09:00.731 --> 00:09:03.370 so much more than the other? 00:09:03.370 --> 00:09:04.892 Looked at from this angle, 00:09:04.892 --> 00:09:08.191 theirs becomes a story about reading. 00:09:08.191 --> 00:09:10.847 The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader 00:09:10.847 --> 00:09:13.646 has a combination of two very different temperaments, 00:09:13.646 --> 00:09:16.496 the artistic and the scientific. 00:09:16.496 --> 00:09:19.000 A good reader has an artist's passion, 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:21.423 a willingness to get caught up in the story, 00:09:21.423 --> 00:09:23.534 but just as importantly, the readers also needs 00:09:23.534 --> 00:09:26.745 the coolness of judgment of a scientist, 00:09:26.745 --> 00:09:28.236 which acts to temper and complicate 00:09:28.236 --> 00:09:31.634 the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. 00:09:31.634 --> 00:09:34.839 As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. 00:09:34.839 --> 00:09:38.479 They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. 00:09:38.479 --> 00:09:42.468 The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. 00:09:42.468 --> 00:09:44.592 Of all the narratives their fears wrote, 00:09:44.592 --> 00:09:48.243 they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, 00:09:48.243 --> 00:09:51.462 the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: 00:09:51.462 --> 00:09:53.413 cannibals. 00:09:53.413 --> 00:09:55.694 But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears 00:09:55.694 --> 00:09:59.175 more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, 00:09:59.175 --> 00:10:01.935 they would have listened instead to the less violent 00:10:01.935 --> 00:10:05.223 but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, 00:10:05.223 --> 00:10:10.803 and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:10.803 --> 00:10:13.671 And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, 00:10:13.671 --> 00:10:15.648 we too would be less often swayed 00:10:15.648 --> 00:10:17.524 by the most salacious among them. 00:10:17.524 --> 00:10:19.192 Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about 00:10:19.192 --> 00:10:21.380 serial killers and plane crashes, 00:10:21.380 --> 00:10:23.246 and more time concerned with the subtler 00:10:23.246 --> 00:10:25.300 and slower disasters we face: 00:10:25.300 --> 00:10:28.048 the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, 00:10:28.048 --> 00:10:30.591 the gradual changes in our climate. 00:10:30.591 --> 00:10:34.240 Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, 00:10:34.240 --> 00:10:38.688 so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. 00:10:38.688 --> 00:10:41.585 Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift 00:10:41.585 --> 00:10:44.517 of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, 00:10:44.517 --> 00:10:46.752 a way of glimpsing what might be the future 00:10:46.752 --> 00:10:50.187 when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. 00:10:50.187 --> 00:10:53.583 Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious 00:10:53.583 --> 00:10:55.740 as our favorite works of literature: 00:10:55.740 --> 00:10:58.785 a little wisdom, a bit of insight 00:10:58.785 --> 00:11:01.359 and a version of that most elusive thing -- 00:11:01.359 --> 00:11:02.610 the truth. 00:11:02.610 --> 00:11:07.641 Thank you. (Applause)