2.

Don’t look. Look. This refrain has played in my head much of my life, one voice telling me it’s wrong to stare at morbid events and another urging me to stare anyway, hard.

It’s my turn to pass the accident on the side of the highway. I tell myself to keep my eyes on the road, to avoid being one of those rubberneckers who clog traffic just for some sick titillation. But decadent anticipation takes over; I realize I’m going to gaze, and I’ll enjoy the experience all the more because it’s frowned upon. I hit my brakes and gape, until an angry horn prods me forward.

In high school, I heard there was a fight behind the cafeteria. I hurried along with everyone else to see it. Elbowing classmates aside to get a better view, I felt shame mixed with excitement. Here was something savage, but also vital, one boy mauling another.

In both cases, and there have been many others, there was a compulsion to watch, like that tickle in the throat, followed by the irrepressible cough, or the awful urge to sneeze: once it activates, it’s impossible to contain. The only good of holding back is that it makes the imminent release more intense.

I imagine we’ve all felt that guilty rush before the morbid. The exploitation of a suicidal starlet, the assassination of a world leader; the hypnotic crush of a hurricane, the lion exploding into the antelope; the wreckage and the rapture, the profane and the sacred: whatever our attraction, we are drawn to doom.

Everyone loves a good train wreck. We are enamored of ruin. The deeper the darkness is, the more dazzling. Our secret and ecstatic wish: Let it all fall down.