“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

— from ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

“In dread we are ‘in suspense.’ Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’”

- Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (trans. R. F. C. Hull & A. Clark) in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (ed. W. Kaufman), 2004, Plume, 249

Rose Tavern, near the Broadmoor/Central City border

Erin (see below post) made this iPhone picture – an amazing display of photographic prowess as it was taken one handedly as she held plastic grocery bags over the car’s headlights.  We did so to diffuse the light (her idea). It worked marvelously.

PS – this is one desolate neighborhood – especially at 2am, and it is home to the old Tivoli Theater building on Washington Ave, which shares its name with the theater WP wrote about in the opening of The Moviegoer.  The building is now the biggest funeral parlor you’ve ever seen.  I’ve photographed the Rose Tavern a handful of times but have never gotten it right.  I think, or at least I hope, that on this last time – with the great assistance via ECB – I got it.

This was a special day.  We ate Hubig’s, drank Coors and drag raced scooters up and down the waterfront.

No more upset mornings
No more trying evenings
This American Dream I am disbelieving
When the gas in my tank feels like money in the bank
Gonna blow it all this time, take me one last ride
For the lights of this city, they only look good when I’m speeding
I wanna leave em all behind me cause this time I’m gone
Long gone,
This time I’m letting go of it all
So long,
This time I’m gone

If nothing is everything
If nothing is everything I’ll have it all
If nothing is everything then I will have it all

- e.v.

Commonly defined as a loss of hope, Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the “pillars” of one’s self or identity. If one is invested in being a particular thing, a waiter or an “upstanding citizen,” for example, and one finds oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself that compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of despair, a hopeless state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to “fall back on,” for instance. One is confronted with the irreality of what one had taken to be one’s self.

What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when one isn’t overtly in despair: As long as one has based one’s identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one’s world break down, one is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as, in Sartrean terms, there is no human essence based in reality from which to constitute one’s sense of identity, despair is a truly human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: “Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair.” In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.