Jacqueline Kelen is a writer, lecturer and specialist in the myths of the Western tradition and the mystical process. She was awarded the Inner Freedom Prize 2020.

What do the Hebrew people walking in the desert for forty years, Queen Penelope waiting for her husband Ulysses to return, Sleeping Beauty, Kafka’s land surveyor and Buzzati’s sentry have in common? Or the faraway love sung of by the troubadours and the longing that sears the soul of the mystics?

The different ways of waiting are described here and there: whether with peace, determination or doubt, with confidence and fervour, sometimes with intense joy. Immense and mysterious, waiting weaves the pattern of a whole existence and raises the human being to infinity. Waiting does not mean remaining passive, but knowing how to keep alight the inner fire.

In this fast-paced world dominated by immediacy and dissatisfaction, what can waiting teach us? In an everyday life regulated by the need for infallibility and control, what else can the unexpected reveal to us?

On the border between emptiness and the unknown, waiting and the unexpected were the central themes of this exceptional lecture by Jacqueline Kelen on Thursday 9 March at Espace Le Moulin in Paris.