Anxious Yet Truly Alive

To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life, believes Christian Wiman. Unsettled by a dinner conversation, he examines how to live with this angst amid the “collective ADHD” of contemporary life. “Our anxiety is less the mind shielding itself from death than the spirit’s need to be. It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background…which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things.”