Kierkegaard's Writings Vol. 6

Kierkegaard as poet - an antidote to the dialectical algebra of The Sickness Unto Death:

Or was there not a time also in your consciousness, my lis-
tener, when cheerfully and without a care you were glad
with the glad, when you wept with those who wept, when
the thought of God blended irrelevantly with your other
conceptions, blended with your happiness but did not
sanctify it, blended with your grief but did not comfort it?
And later was there not a time when this in some sense
guiltless life, which never called itself to account, vanished?
Did there not come a time when your mind was unfruitful
and sterile, your will incapable of all good, your emotions
cold and weak, when hope was dead in your breast, and
recollection painfully clutched at a few solitary memories
of happiness and soon these also became loathsome, when
everything was of no consequence to you, and the secular
bases of comfort found their way to your soul only to
wound even more your troubled mind, which impatiently
and bitterly turned away from them? Was there not a time
when you found no one to whom you could turn, when the
darkness of quiet despair brooded over your soul, and you
did not have the courage to let it go but would rather hang
onto it and you even brooded once more over your despair?
When heaven was shut for you, and the prayer died on your
lips, or it became a shriek of anxiety that demanded an ac-
counting from heaven, and yet you sometimes found
within you a longing, an intimation to which you might as-
cribe meaning, but this was soon crushed by the thought
that you were a nothing and your soul lost in infinite space?
Was there not a time when you felt that the world did not
understand your grief, could not heal it, could not give you
any peace, that this had to be in heaven, if heaven was any-
where to be found; alas, it seemed to you that the distance
between heaven and earth was infinite, and just as you
yourself lost yourself in contemplating the immeasurable
world, just so God had forgotten you and did not care
about you? And in spite of all this, was there not a defiance
in you that forbade you to humble yourself under God's
mighty hand? Was this not so? And what would you call
this condition if you did not call it death, and how would
you describe it except as darkness?

Boredom

Boredom 

is the root 

of all evil--

the despairing 

refusal 

to be 
oneself.

- 

Soren

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard Quote

Here's the bit from Kierkegaard that Milch likes to quote (and as difficult as it is to read Kierkegaard, this does not seem like the best translation):

Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self-deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.

This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.