However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.

Ballard contrasts the conscious mind’s curated self-narrative with the deeper, involuntary archive of the body. He suggests that what persists most powerfully in “biological memory” is not pleasure or neutral experience but threat: the residue of danger, terror, and survival conditioning. The closing claim—“Nothing endures for so long as fear”—treats fear as evolution’s most durable inscription, a feeling that outlasts rational reassurances and even reshapes perception and behavior. In Ballard’s broader thematic universe, this also implies that modern life’s pathologies and obsessions are often driven less by deliberate choice than by primitive, persistent anxieties that culture and technology merely repackage.