Extract

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

The sickness is despair, and it is not the dying that is terrible but the fact that one cannot die, that the self is trapped in an agonizing relation to itself from which there is no escape by merely ceasing to exist. Kierkegaard published this work in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, a voice of faith so exacting that even its author could not claim to embody it. The argument unfolds with the relentless precision of a geometric proof applied to the soul: despair is the misrelation of the self to itself, and it comes in forms so subtle that the most despairing man may not know he despairs. The only cure is the leap into the hands of the power that established the self.