I try now to remember, reader, something like the emergence of consciousness in my otherwise selfless body, and how I dealt with the familial feeling of despair - call it suffering or dread or death - which has been so passionately fed by myself to myself in particular, and by Nature to Man in general. About this, I have to say that, for me, the birth of consciousness and the beginning of despair are somehow fused into one another, for what is consciousness if not the awareness of the mismatch between what is and what could be, between the apparently unlimited capacity of Man to imagine fresh, creative and sublime realities, and the consistent failure of Man in producing them? The optimist reader might say that consciousness does not only come with such heavy weights as dread, but that it can come - and often does come - with sparks and glimmers of what is good and beautiful. First, it is quite alright to be an optimist and I do like optimists, being myself one of them. Well, to be frank with the reader... what I am is really a kind of rational pessimist, who cannot help but to dream of becoming an optimist, knowing perfectly well that the dream reveals his personal desires. So yes, let us then assume that along with the qualities that we, Man, in retrospect observe in ourselves to be ugly, there are also qualities that are, a priori, redeeming and maybe even good. I do want to talk about such qualities, and I am sure to reflect upon them later on; but my goal right now is to define the problem, and any problem, by essence, has to be expanded on the basis of negative points which we care to at least ameliorate, if not completely solve. This implies that such valued things as we call good and beautiful, bold and brave, can only be understood against a background of those qualities in Man which are unworthy of praise and, beyond that, maybe even worthy of condemnation - although both types of things are unforgivingly and undeniably human features.
Reader, let me just state the problem is that the propensity of Man to imagine realities that go beyond what is and can be operational in the world, and his immediate, natural impulse to build such realities exactly as he imagines them - and to the most absurd level of minutia! - inevitably puts him face-to-face with limitation and impossibility. It is not the fault of consciousness that she came into being with the capacity to fantasize and with the tendency to thrive for the fantasy, and that the laws of nature, by nature of being laws, exclude the infinite dream and the utopian. Hence, the first strikes of impotence make themselves feel on consciousness, to be followed by a fervent fury - a very conscious and rational fury, at that - born from trying and failing, over and over again, to bend reality to conscious will. Consciousness then comes to the conclusion that although she has the power to choose to act in the world as is, she does not have the power to realize her own particular fantasies in that world, as if the fantasies were made of a different substance from all other things that obey natural and mathematical law. Consciousness then wishes that she did not wish - and can we blame her for that, reader? - but also that it cannot do. This is precisely when despair comes in.... Despair is the feeling ensuing from the conscious and rational conclusion that although consciousness determines herself in the world, in the sense that it has the power to define herself by acting in that world, she cannot change the world as fits her fantasy and she cannot choose not to be that way. Dread is the feeling of absurdity, meaninglessness and stupidity towards reality itself, felt by consciousness when she looks unto herself and reasons about her situation. And it is here, at this point, that she has to decide either to engage in the world as is, or stay idle with respect to it. In either case, she knows that it is a choice and that she cannot not choose.