Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Once again, Patricia Pearson:

Clusters seem to disgust me. Not flocks — I don’t mind hordes of birds or bats. When my Sheltie scoots after the pigeons in the park and they take to the air, I do not, personally, experience them as “brainless assassins after my life.” No, it’s the vision of witless and aggressive reproduction that I find unnerving. Dandelions, mushrooms, googly eyes. Buzz off with the mindless profusion. I can’t stand that sense of things just … popping up all over the place. This is a subject of great interest to the scholar William Miller, author of The Anatomy of Disgust. There are horrors that have more to do with disgust than with fear, although the two emotions are closely intermingled. What disgusts us isn’t necessarily something we feel is going to harm us — we just want to distance ourselves, to recoil. We don’t want what Miller calls “thick, greasy life” to be on us, or in us. Certain substances raise the prospect of contamination or invasion. “The disgusting can possess us,” says Miller, “fill us with creepy, almost eerie feelings of being not quite in control.” Hence, some people’s aversions to mayonnaise and gravy and pond scum or, in my case, to multiplying clusters.

A Brief History of Anxiety … Yours and Mine (Bloomsbury; $23.95)