Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling

If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting force writhing in dark passions that produced everything great and insignificant, if a bottomless, insatiable emptiness lurked beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond that tied humankind together, if one generation after another rose like leaves in the forest, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and futile activity, if an eternal oblivion always hungrily lay in wait for its prey and there were no power strong enough to snatch it away – then how empty and hopeless life would be! But that is why it is not so, and as God created man and woman, so he fashioned the hero and the poet or orator. The latter can do nothing that the former does, he can only admire, love, and rejoice in the hero. Yet he too is happy, no less than the former, for the hero is so to speak his better nature with which he is infatuated yet delighted that it is after all not himself, that his love can be admiration.