An old, time-honored, and trustworthy devotional book declares that God deals with a human being as the hunter deals with game: he chases it weary, then he gives it a little time to catch its breath and gather new strength, and then the chase begins again. Woe to the person who wants to build up without knowing the terror; indeed, he does not know what he himself wants! But the person who knows that the terror is there also knows that the relapse is a sign that anxiety’s chase begins again, or if there is no relapse, then there nevertheless is anxiety about it when anxiety borrows the strength of the future. When the past is allowed to remain what it is, the past, when a person leaves it by stepping onto the good path and does not look back too often, he himself is changed little by little, and the past is imperceptibly changed at the same time, and eventually they do not, so to speak, suit each other. The past fades away into a less definite form, becomes a recollection, and the recollection becomes less and less terrifying. Finally the past becomes almost alien to him; he does not comprehend how he could possibly have gone astray in that way, and he hears recollection’s account of it just as the traveler hears a legend in a distant land. But the relapse teaches one to understand how it was possible; indeed, anxiety about the relapse, when it awakens suddenly, even though there is only a moment left, knows how to use it to make everything present, not as a recollection but as something future.
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p. 344-345Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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... anxiety is a reflection, and in this respect is essentially different than sorrow. Anxiety is the organ by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the energy of the movement by which sorrow bores its way into one’s heart. But the movement is not swift like the thrust of a dart, it is successive; it is not once for all, but it is constantly continuing. As a passionate, erotic glance desires its object, so anxiety looks upon sorrow to desire it. As the quiet, incorruptible glance of love is preoccupied with the beloved object, so anxiety occupies itself with sorrow. But anxiety has another element in it which makes it cling even more strongly to its object, for it both loves it and fears it. Anxiety has a two-fold function. Partly it is the detective instinct which constantly touches, and by means of this probing, discovers sorrow, as it goes round about the sorrow. Or anxiety is sudden, posits the whole sorrow in the present moment, yet so that this present moment instantly dissolves in succession. Anxiety is in this sense a truly tragic category, and the old saying: quem deus vult perdere, primum dementat, (whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes insane) in truth rightly applies here. That anxiety is determined by reflection is shown by our use of words; for I always say: to be anxious about something, by which I separate the anxiety from that about which I am anxious, and I can never use anxiety in an objective sense; whereas, on the contrary, when I say “my sorrow,” it can just as well express that which I sorrow over, as my sorrow over it. In addition, anxiety always involves a reflection upon time, for I cannot be anxious about the present, but only about the future; but the past and the future, so resisting one another that the present vanishes, are reflective determinations.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
Rollo May
Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his existence as a self ... most anxiety comes from a threat to social, emotional and moral values the person identifies with himself. And here we find that a main source of anxiety, particularly in the younger generation, is that they do not have viable values available in the culture on the basis of which they can relate to their world. The anxiety which is inescapable in an age in which values are so radically in transition is a central cause of apathy ... such prolonged anxiety tends to develop into lack of feeling and the experience of depersonalization.
Rollo May
[Successful meditation brings about realizations:] That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you are creating it in every moment... Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now; see, but it's still now — and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility...
Alan Watts
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
Theodor Adorno
Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye
Kiernan, Caitlin R.
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