as in principle is despair, private association, which assumes a separateness from the world of experience. So Kirchegard was no fucking dope. In his journals, this guy was so fucking nuts. You know what he published this under the name of Anteclimicus? Soren Kirchegard is too normal in name. In a journal entry with the heading report on the sickness under death, which is this essay, he wrote, there is one difficulty with this book. It is too dialectical and stringent for the proper use of the rhetorical, the soul stirring, the gripping. The title itself seems to indicate that it should be discourses. The title is lyrical, taking into account emotion. Perhaps it cannot be used at all, the thing that he just written. But in any case, it is enriched with an excellent plan which always can be used, but less explicitly in discourses. The point is that before I really can begin using the rhetorical, lyrical, say, I always must have the dialectical thoroughly fluent, must have gone through it many times. That was not the case here with the thing that he had just written. Now, just in case you think, he can't write, that he can only write in this abstract dialectical way, if it is to be structured rhetorically as opposed to dialectically. What I read to you before, that's dialectical. It's almost like algebra. In other words, every time you hear the self relating to itself, if you gave that a letter value, a, and made it purely schematic, a plus b equals what he was writing would make sense there of a kind. But that's a purely algebraic formulation, a pure abstraction, a symbolizing of thought. But now he's saying, here's another way of communicating. If it's to be structured rhetorically, it must be structured rhetorically under certain main points, each of which would become one discourse. Number one, it's hiddenness. Number two, it's universality. Number three, it's continuance. Number four, where is it situated? In the self now, he's starting to go a little wacky again. But the point is that the task is much too great for a rhetorical arrangement. Since in that case, every single individual figure would also have to be depicted poetically. The dialectical algebra works better. Now it doesn't work better, it doesn't. But it works better for him first to represent it symbolically, algebraically, a dialectical algebra. Now he's trying to think of another way. If he were to express it poetically, check this out. Was there not a time also in your consciousness, my listener, 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, was not separate from it. And later was there not a time when this in some sense guiltless life, which never called itself into account, which was never thought about, but just lived, when this guiltless life vanished, did they 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 brooding, when heaven was shut from you and the prayer died on your lips, or it became a shriek of anxiety that demanded and accounting from heaven, but this was soon crushed by the thought that you were on 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 never heal it, could not give you any peace, that this had to be in heaven, if heaven was anywhere to be found, and 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? So it wasn't like he couldn't do it, it wasn't like he couldn't bring it alive, and there is the enormous consolation, even as we experience the searing pain of that description, of despair, the fact that it is being conveyed is paradoxically a release, the yielding to a dialectical algebra at the beginning of, now that was a journal entry, what I just read to you, and the resort to a dialectical algebra before finally coming to an emotional presentation of the nature of despair, and its solution, which is to rest transparently in the energy which gave it rise, is an exhibition of patience, a making available at the level of reason, since this is an epistemological, I say, at the level of reason of what will allimately contradict reason.