Perhaps I like panic in art so much because I feel that it’s one of the most relatable emotions that an author can pass on to a modern audience. To live in the modern world is—and maybe I’m projecting here, but—to be always on the precipice of panic. The machinery of our world as it’s been built out is driven by this panic, kept in perpetual motion by an engine of anxious stomach-eating anxiety. It’s a nameless feeling of tension that a lot of people identify as “fight or flight mode.”

Maybe this explains the pseudocolonial power of the global coffee industry: millions of bleary-eyed people (myself very much included) waking up as innocents each morning until they tune to the panicked frequency of global Capital with a delicious mug of an imported blend. But, well, it beats the alternative dread that comes in its absence and precedes it.

This gross-scale mixed-media oscillation between panic and dread is where Krasznahorkai thrives, and it’s squarely where the cryptic narrative of Chasing Homer lives. He emphasizes the importance of rhythm with his prose and the accompanying music pushes this connection with the oral poetry of Homer further. This is an ancient world of spinal reaction with no past and no present, where humans are indistinguishable from rats running through mazes in a laboratory.

But Krasznahorkai understands that there is more than just panic and dread. These big bad feelings don’t enter the world in a vacuum. They are so acutely felt specifically because they are always shot through with intense, seemingly random, moments of black humor or awed beauty amidst the chaos. For an entire narrative existing without past or future, from moment to moment, connection with the literary world must come in tiny bursts. A tour guide frustrated with a set of tourists for not understanding the emotional weight of Calypso’s presence in the Odyssey. A moment of inexplicable calm in the middle of a wine-dark ocean of panic.

I think this is why I like horror movies and songs that sound like a logorrheic panic attack. In order to dig at the true roots of the good human feelings, they have to be earned. And feelings of beauty and transcendence always shine brighter against the backdrop of a tar pit.