Lux lucet in tenebris

Ah! must one eternally suffer, or else eternally flee beauty? Nature, pitiless sorceress, ever victorious rival, do let me be! Stop tempting my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome.

The phenomenology of these types of pathological experiences suggests in some cases the sufferer can no longer participate in the world and temporality is lost. The sufferer cannot project themselves into a future of events and there is therefore no sense of ‘things getting better.’ . . . Here the future appears to be held in abeyance; and yet the sufferer experiences and appreciates this ‘stopped’ future in the present because this stopped future is embedded in the present. Here ‘now’ and ‘yet-to-come’ are no longer moving apart from each other . . . because they are bound to one another in suffering. With the future ‘closed,’ the sufferer’s experience of the past also becomes disordered because the past can no longer be experienced as a horizon onto the open future. The past itself becomes fixed once and for all because it cannot be abolished by any future living, because the suffering present displaces the past and future and deprives the lived present of its value . . . The present, enclosed between the faults of the past . . . and the noncompensatory future . . . becomes impoverished and the course of time begins to slow down.

“We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.”