Term Papers Can Wait

Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that, in the intervals that one is free of it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is. I am not an authority on fear, avoiding the condition whenever possible, but I do know that its worst agony comes well beforehand, in the period of suspense; by the time the crucial moment arrives, a certain detachment - a fatalistic sense, a longing to finish the suspense, and finally a dull resignation - has replaced the quaking. Stupidly, one plods to meet one's fate. -Peter Matthiessen's The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness