contemplation of which constituted his view of life, so will the post horn
on m ytable alwa ys remind me of the meaning of life.”
And with this the first part ofRepetitionconcludes. The second part
can begin.
To Become Oneself Again Is to Become Someone Else
After being reinstalled in his pleasant apartment, Constantin Constantius has
difficult ypassing the time. Armed with a “fl yswatter,” he pursues “ever y
revolutionar yfl y” that might attempt to disturb the peace, but it is onl y
when he unexpectedl yreceives a letter one da ythat the stor ycomes back
to life. The letter was mailed from Stockholm, written b ythe Young Man,
whose critical condition proves to be unchanged. The erotic conflict had
made a far deeper impression on him than Constantin Constantius had at
first assumed, and therefore, he argues unhesitatingly, “there is nothing left
for him except to make a religious move.”
Taught b ybitter experience, Constantin Constantius ought to know that
this sort of thing is more easil ysaid than done. And perhaps he does, for a
bit later he explains that it is precisel ybecause the Young Man has realized
that “humanl yspeaking” his love is impossible that he is situated at “the
boundar yof the wondrous,” and this is wh yhis love can onl ybe realized
“b yvirtue of the absurd.” From Constantin Constantius’s point of view,
however, what the Young Man is concerned with is b yno means the young
woman—it is “not possession in the stricter sense”; rather, it is “the recur-
rence in a purel yformal sense.” In other words, it is not the young woman
whom the exiled youth must regain by virtue of the absurd, it is himself. If
he could return to her and reconcile himself with her, he would have atoned
for his guilt, which would have been taken back. And such repetition would
be forgiveness.
Of the eight letters the Young Man sends to Constantin Constantius, the
first is the longest. In it he confesses his fearful fascination with Constantin
Constantius, whose heartless reasonableness has imparted cool clarit yto his
amorphous passions. Soon thereafter, however, the passion is displaced
backwards onto a well-known figure and an unexpected fellow sufferer
from the Old Testament, the tormented Job, in whose nameless sufferings
and harsh fate the Young Man sees his own situation adumbrated. Thus he
relates how he takes “joy in copying down, over and over again, everything
he [Job] said, sometimes in Danish script, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in