How much suffering there is to get through

Rilke : "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!" (How much suffering there is to get through!)

The wider cycles of life and death

"Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying."

In suffering he is unique

"When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."

Human existence is contingent

"What marks modernist thought from one end to another is the belief that human existence is contingent– that it has no ground, goal, direction, or necessity, and that our species might quite easily never have emerged on the planet. This possibility then hollows out our actual presence, casting across it the perpetual shadow of loss and death. Even in our most ecstatic moments, we are dimly aware that the ground is marshy underfoot – that there is no unimpeachable foundation to what we are and what we do. This may make our finest moments even more precious, or it may serve to drastically devalue them."

A ‘useless passion’

"But they do not give the appearance of being troubled by what has been called ‘ontological anxiety’: namely, the feeling (sometimes accompanied by a particularly intense hangover) that one is a pointless, superfluous being – a ‘useless passion’, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it"

You cannot create experience

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-- Albert Camus

The questioners who are ultimately in question

 

"Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question."

- William Barrett

We need to continue that becoming

"If success is about becoming through doing, it does not, then, just contrast with having once been successful, it also contrasts with once having become something. As Jonathan Rée explains in his perceptive discussion of Kierkegaard, this kind of becoming is a process which can never end. In order to become what we seek to be we need to continue that becoming or we cease to be what we once became."

Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions

 

‘[Man is] nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’

Life emits a fragrance

 

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." - Henry David Thoreau

Life is simply meaningless

 

“Life is simply meaningless, no refusal to accept that fact on our part can render it meaningful.”

Life can only be understood backwards

 

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD, JOURNALS

Refusing to grant a meaning to life

 

"... people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

A uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness

 

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

The inner depth in that life

 

“For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life.”

~ William Barrett

What is this is-ness?

 

“Jaspers has written: “The non-rational is found in the opacity of the here and now, ...in the actual empirical existence which is just as it is and not otherwise.” Why is it not otherwise? Why is it at all? What is this is-ness? Isn’t it simply nothing, or rather Nothingness, the unknowable, indispensable Void? What could be more absurd, “non-rational,” meaningless? The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning—this is its self-defining cause—and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea. “

Life begins on the other side of despair

 

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

~ Sartre

Suffering is the origin of consciousness

 

“Suffering is the origin of consciousness”

~ Dostoevski

Nothingness as a force, a ground, a reality

 

“Yet when the Existentialist looks inside himself, what does he find? Nothing. Looking back beyond birth or forward beyond death, he sees the void; looking into his own center, thrusting aside all knowledge, all memory, all sensation, he sees the chasm of the ego, formless and inconceivable, like the nucleus of an electron. And he is led to ask, as philosophers throughout history have asked: why is there anything instead of nothing, why the world, the universe, rather than a void? By concentrating all attention on this nothing within himself and underlying the objective surface of reality, he gradually transforms nothing into the concept of Nothingness, one of the truly great accomplishments of human sensibility. Nothingness as a force, a ground, a reality - in a certain sense the reality. From this comes man’s despair, but also, if he has courage, his existential integrity.”

For millions this life is a sad vale of tears!

For millions this life is a sad vale of tears
Sitting round with really nothing to say
While scientists say we’re just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DNA
MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE