Soren Kierkegaard, from his book Repetition, 1843
Channel: Craig Campbell
Date: 2013-10-21

I, Johannes Climacus, born and brought up here in Copenhagen, now thirty years old, assume that there exists for me as well as for a servant-girl or a professor of philosophy, a highest good; I have heard that Christianity conditions its attainment. I ask the question: how do I enter into relations with Christianity? 
Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Postscript 1846

"Hope is a new garment, starched and stiff and glittering; but it has never yet been worn, and hence one does not know whether it will fit, or how it may become one. Memory is an old garment, and useless, however beautiful; for it has been outgrown. But the repetition is an imperishable garment, fitting closely and tenderly; it neither flutters too loosely about the person nor presses the body too close. 

Hope is a beautiful girl who slips away through your fingers; memory is a handsome old lady, never quite serving the purpose of the moment; but the repetition is a beloved wife of whom you never tire, for it is only the new that tires. The old never tires, and when the mind is engrossed with the old it is happy. Only he finds a true happiness who refuses to yield to the delusion that the repetition ought to give him something new; for then he will be bored. 

Hope is a prerogative of youth, and so is memory; but it requires courage to will the repetition. Whoever is content to hope is a coward, and whoever is content to remember is a pleasure-seeker; but whoever has the courage to will the repetition is a man, and the more profoundly he has known how to interpret the repetition to himself, the deeper is his manhood. 

But whoever fails to comprehend that life is a repetition, and that this constitutes its beauty, condemns himself, and deserves no better fate than that which will eventually befall him, which is: to be lost. 

For hope is an alluring fruit that fails to satisfy; and memory is a miserable pittance that fails to satisfy; but repetition is the daily bread that not only satisfies but blesses. When a man has circumnavigated the globe, it will appear whether he has the courage to under- stand that life is a repetition, and the enthusiasm to find his happiness therein. Whoever does not circumnavigate the globe before he begins to live, does not begin to live. Whoever makes the journey, but is overtaken by weariness, shows that he had a poor constitution. 

But whoever chooses the repetition, lives. He does not run here and there to catch butterflies, like a child; nor does he stand on tiptoe to behold the glories of the world, for he knows them. He does not sit like an old woman at memory's spinning-wheel, but he wends his way through life calmly and quietly, happy in the repetition. 

And what indeed would life be, if there were no repetition? Who could wish to be a tablet on which every moment Time writes a new inscription, or a mere memorial of the past? Who could wish to be subject to everything that is new and flighty, and to permit his soul ever and again to be engrossed with an ephemeral pleasure? 

If God had not willed the repetition, the world would never have come into being; for he would either have permitted his fancy to pursue the easy plans of hope, or recalled it all, and kept it only in the memory. But this he did not do, and therefore the world stands, and stands because it is a repetition. In repetition lies the reality and the earnestness of life. 

Whoever wills to repeat, proves that his earnestness is full-grown and mature."
Swenson 1921, from Repetition 1843