Choice

Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask; do you believe that life will always allow itself to be trifled with; do you believe that one can sneak away just before midnight in order to avoid it? Or are you not dismayed by it? I have seen people in life who have deceived others for such a long time that eventually they are unable to show their true nature. I have seen people who have played hide-and-seek so long that at last in a kind of lunacy they force their secret thoughts on others just as loathsomely as they proudly had concealed them from them earlier. Or can you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demoniac became a legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a human being, the binding power of the personality?

You really should not be facetious about something that is not only earnest but is also dreadful. In every person there is something that up to a point hinders him from becoming completely transparent to himself, and this can be the case to such a high degree, he can be so inexplicably intertwined in the life-relations that lie beyond him, that he cannot open himself. But the person who can scarcely open himself cannot love, and the person who cannot love is the unhappiest of all. And you flippantly do the same; you practice the art of being mysterious to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who cared to guess your riddle—what joy would you have in it then? But above all for your own sake, for the sake of your salvation—for I know no condition of the soul that can better be described as damnation—halt this wild flight.

—Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. II, Balance between Esthetic and Ethical, p160.