Winston refuses to betray his girlfriend, Julia, even when he is beaten and electrocuted, but his gaolers know how to break him. Orwell bestowed his aversion on Winston Smith, the central character in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Musophobia, a loathing of rats that afflicted George Orwell, may derive from rodents’ capacity to carry disease. “If I were on the edge of a precipice,” he wrote in 1942, “and a large grasshopper sprang upon me and fastened itself to my face, I should prefer to fling myself over the edge rather than endure this frightful ‘thing’.” Salvador Dalí had entomophobia, an aversion to insects that may originally have served as a defence against disease. Some of the more common phobias – of spiders, heights, blood and snakes, for instance – seem to be rooted in our evolutionary history, being vestiges of fears that were once essential to our survival as a species. “I can’t even look at little holes,” she wrote in 2016. “When I’m writing, I’ll never stop work if the page number is 13 or a multiple of 13 I’ll just keep on typing till I get to a safe number.” And the model Kendall Jenner suffers from trypophobia, an aversion to clusters of holes. ‘The number 13 never fails to trace that old icy finger up and down my spine,” he confessed. The horror writer Stephen King, whose 1986 novel It is partly responsible for the modern fear of clowns (coulrophobia), is afflicted by triskaidekaphobia. Robert Graves feared the telephone (telephonophobia), and both Augustus Caesar and Caligula panicked at the sound of thunder (brontophobia). Frédéric Chopin was terrified by the idea that he might be buried alive (taphephobia). Cicero dreaded public speaking (glossophobia). Elizabeth I was afraid of the dark (nyctophobia). Steve Jobs wore polo-neck sweaters because he was scared of buttons (a condition known as koumpounophobia). Even the most powerful among us are prey to overwhelming, irrational fears. One woman in 10 and one man in 20 is afflicted by a specific diagnosable phobia – an excessive fear that interferes with normal life – and many more have aversions or anxieties that they describe as phobias. I’ve never tasted it.” A punctured yolk seemed to bleed out its thick, gleaming fluid. “Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?” he asked Fallaci. That white round thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brr!” An egg was all surface or all innards: easily cracked but also impenetrable, horribly intact. “I’m frightened of eggs,” he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1963. Alfred Hitchcock suffered from ovophobia, a horror of eggs.
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