Peter Wessel Zapffe Quotes

Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will.

Death is the most certain and the most uncertain event there is.

To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house.

Depression, angst, a refusal to eat, and so forth, are taken without exception to be marks of a pathological condition, and are treated accordingly. In many cases, however, these phenomena are indications of a deeper, more immediate experience of what life is all about, bitter fruits of the genius of the mind or emotion, which is at the root of every antibiological tendency. It is not the soul that is ill, but its defense mechanism that either fails or is abjured because it is considered—correctly—as a betrayal of man's most potent gift.

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive. That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end.

A central aspect of punishment by imprisonment is that most opportunities for diversion are denied the prisoner. And, there being few other means for protecting oneself against angst, prisoners are for the most part constantly on the brink of utter despair. Any measures he can find to stave off this despair are justified as an attempt to preserve life itself; for the moment he experiences his soul alone in the universe, there is nothing else to see but the categorical impossibility of existence.

Nobody has ever managed to explain what it is they are longing after in religion, but it is quite clear what they are trying to escape from – this earthly vale of tears, one’s untenable existential situation.

Man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle.

The absurdity of life cannot be resolved, but it can be terminated. We can overcome this meaningless world order by constantly letting two become one, over and over again, until the very last human being disappears; an uninhabited Earth is no misfortune.

We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.

Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values and ethical standards.

I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness.