#gentagelsen

[eskwander]

my past in not past anymore but present. it spirals and lives with me. so the shit I've done I can make it happen in a different way. it doesn't change the past but how the past takes place in the present. in my good hours, I don't repeat without at the same time transcending the repetition.

[eskwander]

"Gentagelsen" (usually translated in English by 'repetition') signifies persistence in, and faithfulness to, a chosen course of life, and is thus opposed to the aesthetic standpoint which always flees from one thing to the next. But Kierkegaard also gives the word a more special meaning—that rather of 'resumption' (Gentagelse = 'taking again')—implying that each higher stage of life carries with it the lower in a transfigured form.

"Resumption and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, it is a resumption backwards, whereas resumption properly called is a recollection forwards [= it is a movement that brings our experience into the present and drives us into a future of our choosing]. Therefore resumption, if it is possible, makes us happy, whereas recollection makes us unhappy— provided we give ourselves time to live and do not at once, in the very moment of birth, try to find a pretext for fleeting out of life, alleging, for example, that we have forgotten something [= remaining obsessive unecessarily]."

Extract from Kierkegaard's text, modified to be gender-inclusive + in the translation I've replaced "repetition" with "resumption" + added two notes in between [...].