Terror can produce extraordinary lucidity of mind. It is as if panic, like a waterfall in winter, had been quick frozen into extravagant, fanciful and suggestive patterns. This lucidity of mind, predicated on a provisional separation from the sense of vulnerability, confers no long term immunity from the effects of the terror, but simply postpones the reckoning. Yet, it can be extraordinarily helpful in terms of choosing an immediate course of action. This sudden lucidity of mind, what we might even call the lyricism of terror, this perch on a promontory allowing us to look out not only on the territories of fight and of flight, but beyond them as well, is a product of long evolution.
