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Who wants to face up fully to the creatures we are, clawing and gasping for breath in a universe beyond our ken? I think such events illustrate the meaning of Pascal's chilling reflection: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because . . . everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.

“[T]he moment of waking is always a moment of loss. We are not displaced from dream so much as placed, returned to the condition of place; for at that moment the spaciousness of dream, its infinite filamentation within a mental space, is suddenly contracted, The containedness of place that both Levinas and Blanchot saw as an asset to sleep, a security within which one can let one’s self rest, can also be seen as a limitedness. We awake into a body that is indeed the definitive place, a continuous “here” that we can never transform into a “there.” It is the condition of our fated placement in the world–fated because we do not choose this place, which is not like any other because it is us. We are thrown into the body, into the world, into time. And this primordial fatality is repeated every morning. We are cast upon the shores of our bed linens from out of the infinite ocean of night, left like debris as the dream recedes from us. We then must take up the burden of the mystery: one’s condition as an embodied being in a world that is other than that being, that is in so many ways inert, sluggish, unresponsive to our thoughts and desires. It is not surprising then, that we can often detect an undertone of melancholy in the moment of waking–and precisely melancholy rather than some other shade of regret.”