An excerpt

The Life of Pi: Chapter 56

I want to say a word about
fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a
clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no
law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it
finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are
feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then far, disguised in the garb of
mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and
disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier.
Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes
to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the
latest in weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics
and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself
weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

 Quickly you make rash
decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you have
defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

 The matter is difficult to
put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation,
such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end,
nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the
words with which you speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You
must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if
your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to
forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly
fought the opponent who defeated you.