My Library

But I was a wreck at the time. I laid in bed all morning smoking cigars and drinking Italian coffee. I knew I had to give up on the ASPR -- this a sad business, because it meant betraying Janet Mitchell and Gertrude Schmeidler. And for the first time I realized that I really didn’t want to give up. The contours of this realization were foggy -- but among them appeared the understanding that I "got off," so to speak, on the parapsychology challenge. More clearly put, once I realized that I’d have to give up, then I realized that I was hooked, even addicted -- not to the glamour, etc., of the field, not to the woo-woo psychic persona, but to the thrill of succeeding in experiments -- addicted to the thrill of surmounting the impossible. This kind of "think" is akin to why mountaineers climb mountains -- because "they are THERE." Or akin to explorers who trek into the unknown -- because it is THERE. Dr. Ehrenwald’s fear thing struck a deep resonance in me, a quirk, I suppose, but which now needs to be explained. You see, since childhood I already knew that I was afraid of fear. My entire being could become contorted about things I was afraid of. But the fear was also a fascination, I suppose. I remember an early fear as a child -- that of hiking alone in the woods. One day I determined to do just that, and did so. A simple thing, to be sure. But in the end that fear vanished. Thereafter, when I found myself afraid of something I simply worked up my courage and went and did it -- alone, all by myself. Back in 1953, the idea of having to go into the Army put me in bed a full week with a pillow over my head, a kind of blinding psychotic episode. Then one day I got out of bed and marched to the military recruiting office in Salt Lake City and said "here I am."