I'm dying, so what?

"How do you feel?" I said. "Tell the truth."

"What is the truth? I'm spending more time with Wilder. Wilder helps me get by."

"I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more."

"What is need?" We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?"

"Are you feeling basically the same?"

"You mean am I sick unto death? The fear hasn't gone, Jack." (Delillo, 263).

Despair is a continuum. She despairs. He despairs. And they scour the earth for an answer. Death is that answer. It's imminent, of course. To really feel despair in the first place, one has to recognize the self as a self. To recognize a self brings us closer to the ethical self and thusly despair.

The ethical self is Kierkegaard's idea of the "thinking person," one of true contemplation on the self. This is a choice. Suicide is not a choice, however, even while one longs for death to come and take away the despair. Because once one is faced with suicide and overcomes it, they then can go on to choose life as an ethical self. They choose to be an ethical self as well as discover it, come upon it, and change into it from the aesthetic self or the other self. It brings us ever closer to the authentic self through despair. For the authentic is the ultimate goal to be what one is. The authentic self is how our existence relates to our striped naked self or surd. Only one does not know, willingly know, that one wants to become what one is, but rather because of the frustration of despair aspires to become another or the other, maybe an aesthetic self. This fear of the potential self helps to become closer to the ultimate goal - becoming an authentic self.

Fear death: the pain of it, the inevitability of it, the spontaneity of it, the pain it causes to others, the after-effects. At the same time, we fear the comfortableness of knowing the self, because maybe despair will dissipate when the self is actualized and despair is the highest form of living unlike the aesthetic self or the lowest form of living. So living once self is discovered is a fear - constant fear. This causes a kind of despair, a frustration, loneliness, because we are alone in our despair, misunderstanding, confusion, that builds, maybe, just maybe, if we could escape this and the self by esteeming to become another different self. Since this is impossible, the act of escaping the self, the one true self, it adds to the already despairing despair. Oh the consciousness of despair and the self.

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