On Hate Mail

The eerie but fascinating experience of receiving a massive dose of anonymous vitriol.

There’s a terrifying scene in Stephen King’s The Shining when Richard Halloran, the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, returns to the hotel (in the high Colorado Rocky Mountains) from his winter vacation in Florida.

Richard knows that the Overlook is haunted by evil spirits, but he takes consolation in the fact that not everyone is susceptible to being possessed by these spirits. Unfortunately for Wendy Torrance and her son Danny, the hotel’s evil spirits easily possess Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and frustrated writer who is seething with resentment and latent aggression.

At the beginning of the winter season, as Richard Halloran is giving the Torrance family an orientation, he realizes that Danny shares his power of telepathy, which Richard calls “the shining.” And so he tells Danny, “If you ever have any trouble up here and you need my help, just shine at me and I’ll come.”

Later, as Jack Torrance begins his terrifying descent into homicidal rage, Danny does indeed “shine” at Richard, who is, by then, in Florida for the winter. Fulfilling his promise to the boy, Richard gets in his car and heads for Colorado. However, almost the entire drive, he must endure the evil spirits of the hotel shining at him. As Richard is a black man, the spirits adopt the voices of a lynch mob that seems to come straight out of hell. In the ugliest and most aggressive language conceivable, they tell him what they will do to him if he returns to the Overlook to help the boy and his mom.

Richard Halloran (Scatman Crothers) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation.

When I read this passage, I understood—for the first time in my life—the expression, “to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.” At this moment, it becomes clear to the reader that the Overlook is a portal or vista to hell.

I was reminded of this scene a few days ago when I received a hateful email from an anonymous sender. As strange as it may sound, I enjoy receiving hyper critical emails, because I believe they present a genuine opportunity to learn something. With a little training, one can even learn to enjoy reading hate mail, because the exercise enables one to achieve what Carl Jung called “emotional impermeability.”

Emotional impermeability is the state of being unaffected by insults, not through suppression, but through the exercise of observing one’s emotional response to the insults as though one is watching movie. The point is not to try to suppress the emotions, but simply to observe them as though they are merely facts, and not darts that are being fired at you.

Being on the receiving end of hateful insults is not a bad thing, provided the author offers some explanation for why he feels such animus towards you. Where the whole thing becomes eerie and uncanny is when the anonymous author doesn’t convey why he feels such animus, which normally arises in the context of interpersonal relationships that have gone sour. The dominant emotion of all anonymous hate mail of this type is resentment.

Resentment strikes me as the most terrifying emotion, because in its extreme form, it verges on homicidal rage. Resentment seems closely related to envy, and may be characterized as “malicious envy.”

Armed with a keyboard and an internet connection, an anonymous writer may freely express his resentment, hostility, and malice. We are naturally inclined to interpret such messages as an expression of hate. Because these messages are eerie and uncanny, we may instinctively wish to delete and censor them.

However, instead of deleting and censoring hateful expressions, I believe it is far better to try to learn from them. I asked the anonymous sender why he felt such animus towards me, and I told him I would be extremely grateful for an honest reply. Alas, he blocked my email.