Interest in misfortune is not altogether foreign to us. On the highway, traffic comes to a crawl as drivers otherwise in a hurry slow down to gape at an accident. Is this merely idle curiosity, or is it a deeper interest in accident and misfortune? Isn’t there desire in that glance from the car window, a hunger to see the destructive hand of fate? Aren't we attracted by the pathologies of everyday life?
The word accident is from casus, “fall” It echoes the great fall of Adam and Eve and suggests failure, the fall from grace and perfection. It is related to cadence, an ending, which in music and poetry has an important and satisfying aesthetic function. It is also connected to chance, the fall of the dice. All these senses of accident are at work when we pass an overturned truck on the road and can’t help twisting our necks to catch sight of this common portion of human life. Perhaps ultimately we are attracted to misfortune because it is a figuration of Death, whom we usually deny and yet with whom we have an intimate relationship.
THOMAS MOORE — Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism, (1990)