Last Word
dANGER

I have always been aware that the word “danger” has the word “anger” inside it. I have feared anger, especially my own, and for what I always thought was a good reason: I was afraid I might kill someone.

When I was in first grade, I got into a fight with my next-door neighbor, Becky Leach. I don’t remember what it was about, but when it was clear we couldn’t resolve it, she made a suggestion: “Why don’t you go inside to your kitchen and get the sharpest knife you can find. I’ll do the same, and I’ll meet you back here.”

“ Great idea!” I said with all the fury of a six-year-old certain she was right. I came back in record time, only to find that Becky had outsmarted me. I was there with my knife, and she had returned with her mother.

In those days, if a child was caught trying to knife her neighbor, whipping was the result. What I remember, though, was not the punishment but the lesson: the danger of anger.

One year later, I learned a similar lesson about fire, the external emblem of anger. I had developed a terror that our house would burn down. “A house fire is highly unlikely,” my mother once said, trying to soothe me. “It happens once in a lifetime—at most.” On February 14, 1959, I woke to the smell of smoke. The furnace had caught fire, and I couldn’t get my parents out of bed. Eventually, we all got out and watched as five fire trucks screamed to the house. What had I learned from this episode? Never relax my vigilance, because fire, like anger, can erupt at any time and rage destructively. The fear of fire and the fear of anger melded, and I learned to watch for signs of inner or outer heat. What I forgot was that anger, like fire, is a source of power as well as destructiveness, and if you are always extinguishing it,
the damage will make itself felt in other ways.

Fast forward to February 2003 and a 19-inch snowstorm in Philadelphia. I had shoveled out my car and was digging out my daughter’s. As I lifted my shovel,
I heard a crack and couldn’t straighten up. I crawled up the stairs to my condominium and went to bed. After one year, $1,500 of physical therapy, $555 in chiro-practor visits, painkillers, and two injections, I still had back trouble and was facing a long plane ride to Australia. A wise carpenter building some bookshelves for me told me about a book that had helped him: Healing Back Pain. I snapped that three people had already recom-mended the book, and the pain wasn’t in my head. I nonetheless bought a copy for my flight.

The book argued that repressed anger creates muscle tension that results in pain. The pain, it said, is to distract the sufferer from anger. I made a list of things I might be angry about, ruminated upon this new understanding, and in three weeks the pain was gone. Allowing myself to know and feel the full weight of my anger eased my body of the strain of carrying it for me.
Moving from flame to snow, and from knife to needle, I revised my view of the danger of anger. In civilized society, people must learn to control destructive impulses, but even when buried, anger never goes away. Like a vampire, it returns from the grave to feed on our vitality.

It is crucial to distinguish between the anger of impotence and the anger of protest. Anger that stems from powerlessness is dangerous because the impulse to compensate for helplessness through verbal or physical violence is strong. In contrast, the anger of protest allows us to assert our worth even in the jaws of injustice. When we stifle protest, we subject ourselves to the anger of impotence; we enter the haunted, helpless world of victimhood. Self-assertive anger in the face of oppression leads not to a kitchen knife but to what Virginia Woolf called that “razor edge of balance between opposite forces,” the edge we know as vitality.

Vicki Mahaffey is a professor of English, a Joyce scholar, and author of the forthcoming book Literary Modernism: An Introduction.