I had never been afraid of heights before climbing the Tower of Sienna. But from that moment on, the fear has never left me. I have avoided towers, and high bridges, and ski lifts. I have given up skiing altogether (not that I ever really enjoyed it). Strange that such a sudden experience could mark me so deeply. It is as if I discovered another aspect of the world around me that I can no longer forget. Like when one discovers a coffee stain on a beige carpet, and one cannot not see it any longer. Yes, I discovered something that I did not know was there, and now it lingers in the air. A particular threat. It is an aspect of the element, air.

It is not the fear of falling. The fear of falling concerns my own body. I may be afraid of falling when I ice skate, or windsurf, or try a hover board. Then I feel my muscles contracting, my body getting tense, and I know it is wrong, and that I should remain easy ("Flexible on your legs!" the instructor screams at her students), because that's the way the body can cope with, and correct, minor disequilibrium. But, of course, there was nothing like that on the stairs of the Tower.

My body was taken up by the fear: I could not breath, despite all the air around me, and I was sweating, and maybe my hands were shaking. But my body was not fighting against the fear of falling. The threat was in air itself, like it was in the rock of the tunnel of the Fréjus. In the tunnel, there was no danger. I could not find any danger that I could be afraid of.

It is not the Angst, that absolute indeterminate fear that takes hold of Heidegger's Dasein when things become unfamiliar. The elemental fear is not indeterminate. It concerns rocks, or water, or a certain type of water. In fact, it proves that we are not isolated in the world like Heidegger's Dasein. The elements communicate with us. They send their threats, their invitations, promises of joys and promises of pains, to some part of the us that we ourselves can hardly understand. 

Thus there are three kinds of fear: the individual fear, like the fear of falling from a hover board or the fear before a dog barking angrily; the elemental fear, which has a generality but remains determinate; and the anguish, the indeterminate Angst.