Anxiety Quote by John Lancaster Spalding

Anxiety loves a blank space. Spalding’s line isn’t just a neat observation about nerves; it’s an indictment of how the mind budgets fear. A calamity that “threatens” is a story still being written, and that open-endedness is precisely what makes it so corrosive. Once disaster “has befallen us,” it becomes concrete: a fact, a bruise, a ledger entry. Painful, yes, but narratable. The threatened calamity, by contrast, invites infinite drafts of the worst possible version, and we get to star in all of them.

The subtext is moral as much as psychological. Spalding, a late-19th-century Catholic bishop, is writing in an era fascinated by self-mastery and haunted by instability: industrial booms and busts, mass migration, labor unrest, new technologies that made tomorrow feel both miraculous and menacing. In that context, this sentence reads like pastoral counsel aimed at a jittery modernity. He’s not asking you to deny danger; he’s warning that anticipatory dread can become its own calamity, one that steals attention from the actual duties of the present.

The quote works because of its quiet reversal. We assume the real blow should hurt most, yet Spalding suggests the shadow can be heavier than the object. It’s a compact description of how fear functions as a kind of imagination tax: we pay upfront for catastrophes that may never arrive, then discover we’ve been bankrupted by rehearsal.