What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The form — Philosophical pessimism

"We laugh, but inept is our laughter, We should weep, and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass and thereafter Remolded no more."

"Following Schopenhauer, Julius Bahnsen said that we are will, but a will in conflict with itself: always in tension and contradiction. There is no eternal and indivisible will. It is not that the will wants one thing. It wants both. It wants everything, all possibilities. It wants to go and it wants to stay. But we cannot go and stay. We have to choose, which leaves the will forever dissatisfied, because the only way for it to be satisfied is for it to obtain everything it wants, even what is contradictory; but it cannot obtain such a thing."

"The Syndrome. In August 1973 a group of robbers entered the Swedish Credit Bank in Stockholm and took hostages for six days. What no one expected was that the hostages would end up identifying with the robbers/kidnappers. Suddenly they were more afraid of the police and felt that those who were holding them hostage were precisely the only ones who could now protect them. The victims identified with the perpetrators. That event was a small-scale recreation of what happens on a cosmic level. Life is a torment and a curse from the day we are born, but at some point we identify with it. Life is the cause of all our ills. But now we defend it."

"Indifference. On the day of your death, the sky will be blue. The birds will be singing. Somewhere in the world there will be a rainbow that will bring joy to a child. A warm breeze will kiss the smile of a happy person. On the day of your death the cruel coldness and indifference of the universe will be revealed."

"It is no more. That conversation, which was so true and intense, ended and now it is nothing. That life, which was lived so intensely, ended and now it is nothing. We are as ephemeral as words."

"Life is movement. Stillness is an exception, because an individual who does not move is always in danger. That is why stopping is a risk. And when we stop, it is mainly to become aware of what we are doing, what is happening to us and what is happening out there in the world. By staying still we become an easy target. An easy target for all those thoughts and ideas that invade our mental tranquility, that frighten us and sometimes paralyze us. Existential anguish invades us and can take over our being until we are completely disarmed. Our defenses and rationalizations fall. At that moment of complete disarmament, we have no choice but to look at life and watch as the great chain of death unfolds before us, sweeping away and ending everything that exists. Some of us panic. Others of us look for some order or pattern in the world to cling to. Then there are those of us who give ourselves completely to the irrationality of existing (which means living without knowing what for and with an ever-present sense of anguish)."