This rotation is the vulgar, the inartistic method, and is based on an illusion. One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one travels abroad; one is europamüde, one goes to America, and so on; finally, one indulges in a dream of endless travel from star to star.
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No, Antonine was wiser; he says, ‘It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view.’ The method I propose consists not in changing the soil but, as in the real rotation of crops, in changing the method of cultivation and type of grain.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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He enjoys, for everyday purposes, the reputation of being in his right mind, yet he knows that were he to explain to a single person just how things were with him, he would be declared mad. This itself is enough to drive a person mad, yet he does not become so, and that is precisely his misfortune. His misfortune is that he has come to the world too soon and is therefore constantly arriving too late. He is forever quite close to the goal and the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it. His life has no meaning, like that of Ancaeus, of whom it is customary to say that nothing is known of him except that he gave rise to a proverb: ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip’, as if this were not more than enough. His life knows no rest and has no content, he is not present to himself in the moment, not present to himself in the future, for the future has been experienced, and not in the past, because the past has still not arrived.
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Left to himself he stands in the wide world alone, he has no contemporaneity to attach himself to, no past he can long for, for his past has still not arrived, and no future he can hope for, for his future is already past.
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He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already become old; in a way he cannot die, for he has never lived; in a way he cannot live, for he is already dead; he cannot love, for love is always in the present, and he has no present time, no future, no past, and yet he is of a sympathetic nature, and he hates the world only because he loves it; he has no passion, not because he lacks it, but because that same instant he has the opposite; he has no time for anything, not because his time is taken up with something else, but because he has no time at all; he is powerless, not because he lacks strength, but because his own strength makes him impotent.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
Thus were an individual to lose himself in antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, or whatever other period, but in such a way that this was definitely real for him, or if he lost himself in his own childhood or youth in such a way that that was decidedly real for him, then strictly he would not be a genuinely unhappy individual. Were I to imagine, on the other hand, a person who has never had a childhood himself, this age having passed him by without acquiring significance for him, but who now, say by becoming a teacher of children, discovered all the beauty that lies in childhood, and would now remember his own childhood, always look back upon it; then he indeed would be a very fitting example. He wants in retrospect to discover the significance of what, for him, is past and nevertheless remember it in its significance. Were I to imagine someone who had lived without appreciating the joy of life, or its pleasures, and who now at death’s door caught sight of it, but didn’t die, which would have been the best, but revived though not to live over again, then he could well be considered in the matter of who was the unhappiest.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
When an individual who loses his memory, or has nothing to remember, will not become a hoping one but remains a remembering one, that is a form of the unhappy. Thus were an individual to lose himself in antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, or whatever other period, but in such a way that this was definitely real for him, or if he lost himself in his own childhood or youth in such a way that that was decidedly real for him, then strictly he would not be a genuinely unhappy individual. Were I to imagine, on the other hand, a person who has never had a childhood himself, this age having passed him by without acquiring significance for him, but who now, say by becoming a teacher of children, discovered all the beauty that lies in childhood, and would now remember his own childhood, always look back upon it; then he indeed would be a very fitting example. He wants in retrospect to discover the significance of what, for him, is past and nevertheless remember it in its significance. Were I to imagine someone who had lived without appreciating the joy of life, or its pleasures, and who now at death’s door caught sight of it, but didn’t die, which would have been the best, but revived though not to live over again, then he could well be considered in the matter of who was the unhappiest. Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment. The unhappiest one will always, therefore, be found among the unhappy rememberers.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a ‘normal life’ is the exception. Apparently He wants some-but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can,
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant’. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,
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You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
SO GOOD QUOTES 