A further daily excerpt from Cold World…

By “existential horror”, we mean the “special way of being afraid” that Larkin speaks of, a modality of terror that is linked to the very permanence of the real, the fact that it is always there. (Philip K. Dick once defined reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away”). This fear, which “flashes afresh” (like a demonic double of Hopkins’s “shining from shook foil”) from the very midst of things, has the power to both “hold and horrify”. It is not only a fear of stasis, but a terror the experience of which is stasis, the experience of being held fast in place, frozen in the real. In old age Larkin, who had named a book of youthful poems “In the grip of light”, found himself with increasing frequency in the grip of the grave. It is this seizure, this ek-stasis, which connects the rare moments of epiphany in Larkin (as in his description of the “any-angled light” which he imagined would “congregate endlessly” in an uplifted glass of water) with his susceptibility to terrible irruptions of dread. Like the world of the parousia, ablaze with grace, the cold world voided of divine presence is capable of inspiring fear and trembling: a terrible, immobilizing awe.