Kierkegaard

Not that I am about to surrender to Christendom, but this is a beautiful piece of writing:

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then--whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you ranked with royalty and wore a glittering crown or in humble obscurity bore the toil and heat of the day, whether your name will be remembered as long as the world stands and consequently as long as it stood or you are nameless and run nameless in the innumerable multitude, whether the magnificence encompassing you surpassed all human description or the most severe and ignominious human judgment befell you--eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you have despaired in such a way that you did not realize that you were in despair, or in such a way that you convertly carried this sickness inside of you as your gnawing secret, as a fruit of sinful love under your heart, or in such a way that you, a terror to others, raged in despair. And if so, if you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you--or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair.

- The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard.

But sometimes I do wonder when philosophers spent all of their lifetime trying to figure out the questions in life and all about life, if they are, in fact, living. Kierkegaard himself had fallen in love once when he was 24. He had a relationship with Regine Olsen for 3 years, and became engaged. "But despite the loud protests of both his and her families, Kierkegaard broke off the relationship" because "on the one hand, he claimed that he did not want to bring Regine into the severe melancholy that afflicted virtually his entire family, and on the other, he said that he did not think that he could be the religious author that he felt called to be and a husband at the same time." The saddest part about this is "Kierkegarrd would remain obsessed with her for the remainder of his days, even to the point of leaving her the little that he had upon his death."

Thanks to Hannah, I searched and found this video on youtube. It is quite humorous, I must say. Kind of goes with my question here.

This ought to be a Nike commercial. In the end it would say, "Just do it." Adding "DAMMIT".

By the way, I think philosophers are the only ones allowed to write with a tremendous amount of run-on sentences in an essay. Sort of reminds me of my professor, how he would talk without remembering to breathe, and at the end of the final sentence his face would turn bright red.