Ah, it takes a long time for hope to disappear, W. says. Takes time for it to be entirely worn away. Didn't I have hopes of becoming a world-traveller? They were soon dashed. And didn't I have hopes – anti-hopes – of addicting myself to some substance so as to give my life meaning? I failed at that, too, didn't I? Something in me wanted to live. Something that didn't want to disappear into the squats in Old Hulme.
'You were a survivor, despite yourself'. It was like Eye of the Tiger, W. says. It was like Rocky IV, when he runs up those steps in the sun. – 'You wanted to live!' I wanted to live. So what then? What as I ran up the steps towards the sun? It was Kierkegaard who saved me, W. has no question about that. He finds it moving, even. An ape-man reading Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, in his room in his squat on the top floor of an Old Hulme low-rise. A young ape …
But if Kierkegaard saved me, it also prevented me from pursuing my despair to the end. If it gave me hope, it was by destroying that pathos of despair which depends upon the absence of hope. For I wasn't able to despair over the earthly, as Kierkegaard commends, W. says. And wasn't it only by means of such a despair – over despairing over the earthly as a whole, and accepting the fact that there was no happiness to find in the earthly – that Kierkegaard said I might embrace the eternal?
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