Despair Event Horizon Quotes

The choice to remain faithful to the drive to question (the fertile source of the experience of nothingness) brings with it an obscure joy. For to be faithful to that drive...is to be constantly expanding one's horizon, constantly losing one's life, and constantly regaining it. It is to be as alert to other persons, to situations, and to events as one can: to their fragility and terror, as well as to their obscure coherence and often veiled beauty. To be faithful to the drive to question is to accept despair as one's due, to accept risk as one's condition, and to accept the crumbs of discovery as joy. [...] The darkness is habitable...Those who accept the darkness as their lot are instantly secure, not through some newfound solidity but through the perception that insecurity is man's natural state, a truthful state, a healthy state.

WHEN any extraordinary events, unexpected anxieties or catastrophes, intrude themselves suddenly into a life up to that period peaceful and happy, these unexpected emotions interrupt the repose of the soul which lay dreaming in the monotony of prosperity. Misfortune which comes on you in this manner does not seem like an awakening from bliss, but rather like a dream of evil. With the man who has been invariably happy, despair begins with stupor. Unexpected misery is like cramp — it clasps, and deadens everything. Men, acts, and things at that time pass before us like a fantastic apparition, and move along as if in a dream. Everything in the horizon of our life is changed, both the atmosphere and the perspective; but it still goes on for a long time before our eyes have lost that sort of luminous image of past happiness which follows in its train, and interposes without cessation between it and the somber present. Then everything that is appears to be unreal and ridiculous, and we can scarcely believe in our own existence, because we find nothing around us that formerly used to compose our life, and we cannot understand how all can have gone away without taking us with it, and why nothing of our life remains to us.

Music is a feeling I cannot put down in words. I see music. I feel it in every fibre of my body and every part of my soul. A harmony that touches my soul can release torrents within me and shake me to the very foundations, make me remember the good and the bad, hope, and despair. Makes me dark and makes me light.

Evan’s mistake is that he focuses his life on happiness, on how to avoid suffering—he sacrifices even his love only so that he and others will not suffer. However, to use Badiou’s terms, happiness is a category of the “human animal,” of our ordinary life whose horizons are pleasure and satisfaction in all their guises, perverted as they are—this life is effectively just a postponed suicidal despair. If we are to overcome this despair, we have to enter another dimension of existence, what Badiou calls the Event in its four modes: science (philosophy included), art, politics (including politicized economy), and love. To live in fidelity to an Event does not entail happiness but a life of struggle, of risks and tensions, of the creative engagement for a Cause which surpasses our existence.