Either/Or A Fragment of Life

When I was very young I forgot in the cave of Trophonius how to laugh; when I became older, when I opened my eyes and saw reality, I started to laugh and haven't stopped since. I saw the meaning of life was getting a livelihood, its goal acquiring a titular office, that love's rich desire was getting hold of a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help one another in financial embarrassment, that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to make a speech, that courage was to risk losing ten dollars, that cordiality consisted in saying ‘You're welcome' after a dinner, that fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That's what I saw, and I laughed.

Let others complain that our age is evil; my complaint is that it is paltry. For it is without passion. People's thoughts are thin and flimsy as lace, they themselves are as pitiable as lacemakers. The thoughts in their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be considered a sin to harbour such thoughts, but not for the human being shaped in the image of God. Their desires are stodgy and sluggish, their passions sleepy.

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered to ride, the motion is too violent; I can't be bothered to walk, it's strenuous; I can't be bothered to lie down, for either I'd have to stay lying down and that I can't be bothered with, or I'd have to get up again, and I can't be bothered with that either. In short: I just can't be bothered.

The important thing in this respect is to be able to see the concept in each art, and not let oneself be put off by what it can do besides. Man's concept is spirit and we must not allow ourselves to be put off by the fact that he is also able to walk on two legs. Language's concept is thought, and we must not let ourselves be put off by the view of certain sensitive people that its greatest significance is to produce inarticulate sounds.

A certain callousness of reason then teaches a way out: ’Enjoy yourself in constantly discarding the conditions.’ But self-evidently, the person who enjoys himself in discarding the conditions is just as much dependent on them as the one who enjoys them. His reflection turns constantly back on himself, and since his enjoyment consists in the enjoyment’s being given as little content as possible, he is, as it were, hollowing himself out, since naturally such a reflection is incapable of opening up the personality.

What you are drawn to is the first rapture of love. You know how to drown and hide yourself in a dreamy, love-intoxicated clairvoyance. All around yourself you spin the finest spider's web and then lie in wait. But you are not a child, not a waking consciousness, and the look in your eye means something else; but for you that is enough. You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a captured glance, that is what you are after, that is a theme for your idle imagination.

She must owe me nothing, for she must be free: love exists only in freedom, only in freedom are there recreation and everlasting amusement. For although I intend her to fall into my arms through, as it were, natural necessity, and am striving to bring things to the point where she gravitates towards me, it is nevertheless also important that she does not fall as a heavy body, but gravitates as spirit towards spirit. Although she is to belong to me, it mustn't be just in the unaesthetic sense of resting on me like a burden. She must neither be a hanger-on physically speaking nor an obligation morally. Between the two of us must prevail only the proper play of freedom. She must be so light for me that I can take her on my arm.

… but, in bringing the idea to light, reveals its own innermost being. Therefore Mozart with his Don Giovanni stands highest among the immortals.

But now I shall abandon this whole inquiry. It is written only for those in love. And just as it takes little to please a child, everyone knows how the most curious things can bring pleasure to those in love.

The most abstract idea conceivable is the spirit of sensuality (7). But in what medium can it be represented? Only in music. It cannot be represented in sculpture, for in itself it is a kind of quality of inwardness. It cannot be painted, for it cannot be grasped in fixed contours; it is an energy, a storm, impatience, passion, and so on, in all their lyrical quality, existing not in a single moment but in a succession of moments, for if it existed in a single moment it could be portrayed or painted.

This is something I wish to develop in a little more detail. The more abstract the idea, the less the probability. But how does the idea become concrete? By being permeated with the historical. The more concrete the idea the greater the probability. The more abstract the medium the less the probability, the more concrete the greater.

This unity, this inward mutuality, is possessed by every clasic work, and thus one easily sees that any attempt at classifying the different classics based on a separation of matter and form, or of idea and form, is by virtue of that very fact a failure.

He says he could talk with a woman in such a way that, if the devil caught him, he could talk himself free if only he was given a chance to talk with the devil's great-grandmother. This is the real seducer;

Strictly speaking, one would be urging the opposite of what one really intended, as always happens when one operates abstractly in dialectical categories, where it isn't just that we say one thing and mean another but we say the other; we say not what we think we are saying but the opposite. So it is when we make the subject-matter the principle of classification.

Now Mozart's case is similar: there is one work alone of his which makes him a classic composer and absolutely immortal. That work is Don Giovanni.

Immortal Mozart! You, to whom I owe everything to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that over whelmed my soul, the fear that gripped my inmost being

It thinks such a connection fortuitous and sees in it no more than a lucky concurrence of the different forces at play in life. It thinks it an accident that the lovers get each other, an accident that they love each other; there were a hundred other girls he could have been just as happy with, whom he could have loved just as deeply. It thinks many a poet has existed who would have been just as immortal as Homer had that marvellous material not been seized on by him, …

Axel with Valborg, Homer with the Trojan War, Raphael with Catholicism, Mozart with Don Juan. A wretched unbelief exists which seems to contain much healing healing power.

‘Go out into the world, then; avoid if possible the attention of the critics, call on a single reader in a favourable attention of the moment and should you stumble upon a lady reader, I would say: “My fair reader, in this book you will find something you ought perhaps not to know, and something else you might well profit from knowing; so read the first something in such a way that you who have read it can be as though one who has not read it, the other in such a way that you who have read it can be as though one who has not forgotten what has been read." As editor I will only append the wish that the book meets the reader in a favourable hour, and that the fair lady reader succeeds in scrupulously following B's well-intentioned advice.

An aesthetic ‘either’ is one that its ‘or’ can sympathize with because that is where it can come from; and it has the imagination and depth needed to grasp the force of appeals made it to choose the ‘or’.

So the escritoire was set up in my apartment, and as my pleasure in the first period of my enamourmnent had been to look upon it from the street, so now I walked by it at home.

Then I am reminded of my youth and my first love - I longed then, now I only long for my first longing. What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream's content.

Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. 'Will you,' said Mercury, 'have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours we have in our chest of knick-knacks. So, choose, but just one thing.' For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: 'Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.' Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, "It has been granted you."