Wrath

At times I burn with anger. The demon settles and makes a home between my heart and stomach, bursting my metabolism to a rushing, uncontainable mania, where nothing constructive is possible, where concentration is an ally to escape, where I can only face my rage until it drops its guard and I murder it by losing myself in something completely accidental. This rage is the only chink in my detachment armor.

There is too much wrong with the world. Too much. Where is the global flood of our times? I can't imagine a world being worse than this one, but it was; there are lights now that pervade Christian souls -- but where are they? I can only find misery and no company with a world miserable but ignorant of its misery -- screaming undisciplined children; overweight, cowgazing women whose eyes contain a history of apathy; arrogant, selfish elite, content with money and indifferent to others; intellectual chits spouting useless abstractions to prove an incommensurate better-than-thou; partisan civilians bitter to the bone over election results. It all should go up in flames. God, it all should go up in flames.

Jacob has my envy; Jacob could wrestle with God. I don't plant my anger on particularities -- on single souls who wreck darkness microscopically or massively. They can't help it; and where the rest of the world would displace its anger, mine has no target. God can't be wrestled. He hides.

You'll call this blasphemy, but then you clearly haven't read the book of Psalms. I want universal love, but I am a spot of sand on a beach that spreads to infinity. I want the will of God, but the waiting is so tortuously hard, and I'll be damned if I volunteer myself to a descending shadow of ignorance. I dare to say it even if I'm wrong: you'll call me a blasphemer because you're too cowardly to admit the feelings you yourself have. You don't know how to hold your anger; you spread it on the innocent world.

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? -- Kierkegaard, Repetition