Sometimes it’s good to worry

At last, a snappy pop philosophy book which offers to sort out absolutely none of your personal issues. If anything, it will make them worse. ‘There are,’ Francis O’Gorman admits, ‘serious problems for me with the ethics of writing on worry.’ Since words are the very stuff of worry, O’Gorman (himself a worrier) suspects that reading is unlikely to provide a cure. Sufferers would do better to contemplate the sublime balance of Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ (‘a glimpse of a world without fretfulness’) or listen to Bach’s contrapuntal fugues, in which ‘Everything, whatever happens, fits.’ But O’Gorman is not really here to dole out advice:

A while ago, I described this book as I was writing it to a friend. He listened patiently, and rather sceptically. He finally said: ‘Is it like, then, some kind of literary self-help book?’
No. It’s a kind of literary there’s-no-help book.