Desire | Janus Two Faces Of

An innocent, inexperienced student struggling to maintain a standard of "normalcy".

Consider the phenomenon of . This is when you are living a happy moment—say, watching your child play on a beach—and you feel a pang of sadness. That sadness is your forward-looking face seeing the future loss, and your backward-looking face already mourning the present. You are desiring the moment as a memory before it has even ended. janus two faces of desire

Where the first face drives ambition, the second face drives art. Most elegies, sonnets, and films about regret are not expressions of sadness—they are expressions of backward-looking desire, trying to re-inhabit a moment through form and ritual. An innocent, inexperienced student struggling to maintain a