Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

The editors of Anxiety recently asked the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai to contribute to the series. Below, in the author’s words, is “a lyrical essay about the terrible meeting between boorishness and aggressiveness,” a meditation on a type of violent person who produces in him “the deepest personal anxiety.” It was translated by George Szirtes from the Hungarian.

I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

There are of course times I put on a Zelenka mass or listen to one of Schiff’s “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” interpretations, or take out Spoon, Karen Dalton or Vic Chesnutt, but after a few bars I turn it off so it may be quiet again, because I want to be ready and I don’t want anything disturbing going on when he arrives and finds me.

To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t knocked but beat at the door, or simply kicked the door in, but now that I hear the knocking, it’s clear there is no difference between his knocking and beating or kicking the door in, I mean really no difference, the point being that I am dead certain it is him, who else; he of whom I knew, and have always known would come.

The most tragic figure in history is the one in whom two terrible conditions meet. The two conditions that meet and combine in him are bottomless idiocy and unbounded aggression. Someone —a self-exiled Hungarian writer in San Diego — once said that this kind of person inevitably crawls from the gutter during one of those historical lulls. I don’t agree, there is never a sufficiently long lull in history. If he did ever live in one of those filthy historical sewer systems, he has been at liberty for many a long year now, for decades, ready to raise flags, discover kindred spirits, move about in groups and organize secret meetings. He is rarely alone but is always to be found in one of those indeterminate military uniforms, his ideas nonsensical or non-ex