From the rather depressing but entirely sage observations of Sartre yesterday, we come to those of his, though unintended, progenitor, Soren Kierkegaard, today.  To wit, as Kierkegaard observed, "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundations of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is significant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all--what then would life be but despair?"
     Kierkegaard's words are well put, and I think Sartre would agree with them.  Without eternity, life really is about despair.  It's great, but it ultimately has no point.  It's here, yes, it's good, yes, but we still do not know why it is here, why it happened, why it is here rather than not.  Why life?  Though we can live insisting that we do not need to know these things, to do so is not being fully honest about who we are.  We all want to know why we are here.  We're human.
     Put another way, we cannot be fully human without being fully committed to knowing what it is to be human.  Otherwise, we are asking questions about everything, but the most important thing:  why are we anything at all?
     And this is a question that "anything" cannot answer.  The only way that "what is" can explain why it is, is by using what it is to do so.  It's a circle, a circle without an explanation.
     So we ask this question:  is life really no more than Sartre's vision of a vast, bottomless passion?