Apart from anything else, Eliot's poetic gesture captures the amorphous nature of fear as arguably the most complex and powerful emotion in our journey of evolution.

As a human species, we have walked the moon, split the atom, and created the Minotaur's maze of cyber space, but fully understanding the brain remains a work in progress.

It's a reality that Canadian freelance journalist, Eva Holland, acknowledges with the breezy aside: "There's a lot going on up there".

Signalling, perhaps, that this journey has more to do with practicalities than science, although there's evidence of extensive research, bolstered by the credibility of personal experience.

Holland's fear fixation began early.

As an anxious child, a fall on an escalator left her with a stubbornly ingrained fear of heights.

Later, as a young woman, watching her mother's life support system being switched off, Holland felt the weight of unshakeable grief become the hook upon which fear would rest; waiting for its moment to strike.

Of course, fear is a natural response to danger. Without it, we would fall easy victim to all manner of commonplace hazards, and it helps to tease out links between fear, anxiety, and phobia, which Holland does, citing usefully expert opinions along the way.

Basically, fear is specific, anxiety generalised, while phobias are intense and irrational combinations of both.

These often include panic attacks, when a nightmare falls from a clear blue sky.

I know this, because I was crushed by anxiety and depression at an early age, when treatment was far less amenable, and I'm still living with the residue.

Holland's conversational style spans the dilemma of balancing fear between necessary risk prevention and pathological disability, occasionally encountering odd solutions, such as EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) developed in response to post traumatic stress.

Encountering strong scepticism at first, this method - involving rapid eye movement while imagining a specific trigger - has since been widely accepted, although why it works remains unclear.

This is an easy-to-read journey through a personal experience of fear, from the unintended consequences of emotionally misconstrued perceptions, to the crippling terror of phobia.