télos is a tumblelog.

I replied: This perhaps only if the former activity is believed to be the ideal, so if it stops, or is abated, must begin again. But then, there should be, perhaps, growth through what caused it to diminish resulting in the growth of the lover and beloved and bringing their activity of loving to even greater fullness.

She asks: Does this preclude growth, as in, should we always strive for what was?

It is a mistake to believe that love is not aimed at getting what it desires, but getting at what love desires is an activity, and an on going one; but being human, feeble as we are in times of great pressure, or at lesser times when our minds wander under demonic motions that man the internal machinations of depression, we momentarily lose our way. It is in these times that the beloved may feel lost, the lover’s light now shinning dimly on their heart. If the beloved has any obligation to their lover, it is this: to remember the blessedness of what was only known potentially before their lover came; to remind their lover what they can be, and admonish them to be this once more.

An iron fence separates a narrow area where a few tables and chairs stand. At the table that stands in the far right corner, one mostly free of rust, sit two girls, typical in their dress, one with a green fleece pullover, black tights, pink shoes, and the other with unkempt hair done up loosely, her skin an unnatural olive brow. It is her eyes, they with their mystic baby blue–and if you saw them you’d think they are calling to you, but she is mostly oblivious to the way that beauty can strike at you, reveal the error in you, make you search for the truth of the beauty in you.

What, then, is depression? It is hysteria of the spirit. There comes a moment in a person’s life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit. As immediate spirit, a person is bound up with all the earthly life, and now spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, so to speak, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then depression sets in.

Søren Kierkegaard - Either/Or (via dkwon)

Leave it to Kierkegaard to elucidate the experience of depression.

There’s one pretty major problem. I’m 41. Forty-one-year-olds can’t wear white rims. We can’t wear our hair in our face. We have to have babies. We can’t fuck around anymore. So I’m gonna have to go in there and grow up a little bit and get on normal clothes for a 41-year-old. Okay? Look at this… I look like a wrinkled teenager. I look like an apple that got left in the back of a van for all of July. I can’t be dressing like this.