Despair

Besides my large circle of friends I have another intimate confidant: my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me aside, although physically I stay in place. My melancholy is the most loyal mistress I’ve known; what wonder, then, that I love her back.

*

I feel like a chess piece must feel when the opponent says of it: ‘That piece is untouchable’.

*

I have, I think, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I think, the courage to fight everything; but I do not have the courage to know anything, to possess, to own anything. Most people complain that the world is trivial, that life isn’t like a romantic novel, full of favourable opportunities; I complain that life isn’t like a novel in which there are hardhearted fathers and goblins and trolls to battle and spellbound princesses to free. What are all such enemies combined compared to the pale, bloodless, dogged nocturnal forms with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.

*

How barren are my soul and thoughts, and yet how perpetually tormented by vacuous and voluptuous birth pangs! Will my spirit forever be tongue-tied, must I always babble? What I need is a voice as piercing as the glance of Lynceus, as frightening as the groan of the giants, as persistent as a sound made by nature, as mocking as a gust of icy wind, as cruel as Echo’s taunting, ranging from the deepest bass to the most melting high notes, modulated from a solemn whisper to the energy of rage. That’s what I need to be able to breathe, to express what’s on my mind, to shake the depths of my anger and my sympathy. – But my voice is as hoarse as the cry of a gull, or dies away like a blessing on the lips of a mute.

*

What is to come? What will the future bring? I don’t know, I have no idea. When a spider plunges down from a fixed point, as is its nature, it always sees before it an empty space in which it cannot find a foothold however much it twitches. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and horrible, unendurable.

*

Time passes, they say, life is a stream, etc. I can’t feel it, time stands still and I with it. All the plans I form fly straight back at me, when I want to spit, I spit in my own face.

*

My soul is so heavy that no thought can sustain it any longer, no wingbeat lift it up into the aether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm approaches. Over my inner being broods an unease, an anxiety that senses an earthquake.

*

A fire once broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded; he repeated his warning; they cheered even more. This is how I imagine the world will end: to general applause by clever people who think it’s a joke.

*

What philosophers say about reality is often as disappointing as when you see a sign in a second-hand shop that reads Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed, you’d be fooled: it’s the sign that’s for sale.

*

I have only one friend, Echo. And why is Echo my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and Echo doesn’t take it away from me. I have only one confidant, the silence of the night. And why is it my confidant? Because it is silent.

*

What is it that binds me? Of what was the fetter that bound the Fenris wolf made? It was made from the noise a cat’s paws make when it walks, women’s beards, the roots of mountains, the sinews of bears, the breath of fishes and the spittle of birds. So too am I bound by a chain formed of dark delusions, of disturbing dreams, of restless thoughts, of forebodings and inexplicable anxieties. This chain is ‘very supple, soft as silk, resilient even to the strongest strain, and cannot be torn in two’.

*

How horrible boredom is – how horribly boring. I know no stronger expression, none truer, for only like knows like. If only there were a higher expression, a stronger one, then at least there would still be another movement. I lie stretched out, inert; all I see is emptiness, all I live on is emptiness, all I move in is emptiness. I don’t even suffer pain. At least the vulture kept pecking at Prometheus’s liver; at least the poison kept dropping on Loki; there were interruptions, however monotonous. Even pain has lost its power to refresh me. If I were offered all the world’s glories or all its torments, I’d be equally indifferent, I wouldn’t turn over either to reach for them or escape from them. I die death itself. What could possibly divert me? If I saw a loyalty that outlasted every trial, an enthusiasm that bore everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I sensed a thought that bound together the finite and the infinite. But my soul’s poisonous doubt consumes everything. My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird can fly: when it gets halfway, it drops down, spent, to its death.

*

My sorrow is my castle, which lies like an eagle’s nest high up on the mountain peaks among the clouds; no one can storm it. From it I fly down into reality and seize my prey; but I don’t remain there, I bring my prey home, and this prey is a picture I weave into the tapestries in my castle. Then I live as a dead man. In a baptism of forgetfulness I plunge all experiences into the eternity of remembrance. All that’s finite and random is forgotten, wiped out. Then I sit like a hoary, thoughtful old man, and explain the pictures in a soft voice, almost a whisper, and by my side sits a child and listens, although he remembers everything before I tell it.

— Kierkegaard, ‘Diapsalmata’, Either/Or (my tr.)