...of trepidation

As it happened, that evening at the restaurant, spring's heavy rains were on the way. I could tell from changes in my mood. Coming rainfall - the spattering drops that blow in from a distance, out from dark weather advancing over the horizon, blotting out the daytime sun or the Milky Way at night - invariably causes me to feel irritable and worried. Confusion sets in, or a mild fretfulness, really, that grows and intensifies as, from the north or northwest, precipitation advances. Then I become withdrawn, on a sunless day or muggy night, and fall into a mood of quiet trepidation that may, I believe, have its natural analogue in the wary stillness adopted by forest animals during the hours preceding a storm. What is more quiet than that silence heard from skunks and raccoons before a downpour? It follows that anticipation of rainfall engenders, in humans, sensations that could truly be called primordial and atavistic - those old and, in modern urban life, often scarcely perceived terrors of the dark, of isolation and the cold, hunger and loneliness and death from starvation or some other outcome of exposure; the unanalyzable terrors, best articulated not in language, rather by the body's tense, speechless postures of watchfulness and dread.

[The Verificationist, Antrim, D.]