The impossible object is known to be impossible implicitly in the willing itself - in it the promesse de bonheur is shattered, but we adamantly refuse to admit this to ourselves - it is its way of willing to will, and of desiring to desire, and is an act of separation from what we can't bear to let go of. It is also a form of self-assertion, the form it takes before there is a self to properly assert, so that it is experienced as something that comes over us, a heteronomy that drags us into self-centredness, forces what we will come to believe is autonomy. As if it is an echo of our birth and its terrible contingency, the correlative feeling is a huge fear, a seemingly bottomless pool of fear that, now we are far from the shore, we only meet with in the small hours, when, their momentum now stalled, the pathetic frangibility of all our projects is borne upon us. Themes from our own life, from the lives of others, from history, biology and astronomy, assume equal dimensions, mingle promiscuously and float unmoored in the irredeemable. The knowledge that desire can never be satisfied Janus-like points both ways: it makes all our myriad desires possible by allowing us to confuse assuagement with satisfaction and satisfaction with freedom and finality.