Van Gogh One of the things people generally admired about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it. Or a pair of boots. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxietyobjects
The illusion of anxiety Or because of hormones. And so which would not really have been anxiety at all, but only an illusion. Even if one would certainly be hard put to explain the difference between an illusion of anxiety and anxiety itself. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress anxiety
Chilled-out anxiety Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s. Nikil Saval, Cubed technologyanxiety
Paranoia What's worse? Thinking you're being paranoid, or knowing you should be? Shane Carruth, Primer anxiety
What's wrong? Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietylife
Distraction To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King boredommelancholyanxietyattentionpain
Test anxiety It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King anxietyattention
The Waiting Place A Poem by Dr. Seuss silverbirchpress.wordpress.com Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. waitinganxietytimemelancholy
The drop press The virtue of thin sheet metal in giving the greatest glitter for a grain of gold was exploited in the earliest days of metallurgy. However, before the days of rolled sheet and drawn wire, most metal objects were made by hammering and were basically three-dimensional in form. [In contrast] look at the simple drop press — it’s unmodulated blow striking in a single direction symbolizes much of nineteenth-century mechanized production. To make multiple stampings, stacks of very thin metal sheets were superimposed under the hammer, and the final profile with moderately high relief was gradually achieved as finished sheets were removed from the bottom and new ones added at the top. When the drop press was used to shape large areas of thin sheet metal, the aesthetic qualities of the surface became divorced from the underlying substance, and decoration became independent of the body needed to support it. In any object there is a natural relationship between the surface and the bulk, that is, between its one-, two-, and three-dimensional aspects. The fakery involved in applying gold or silver playing on a solid copper object is quite different from the deception of an ornately stamped piece of thin sheet brass. Compare a magnificent ormolu furniture fitting or even a gilded plaster picture frame with a cheap lamp base embossed in thin sheet brass. In the former, the surface is simply and honestly applied for its optical effect alone; in the latter the fakery is fundamental for it is dimensionally misleading. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure Separation of surface and structure