Losing The Tragic And Gaining Despair

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pt. I., tr. Hans Hong and Edna Hong, (Princeton, 1987), The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama, p. 145:

. . . when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair. In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous. In languages, there is sometimes found a word that because of its context is so frequently used in a specific case that it eventually becomes, if you please, independent as an adverb in this case. For the experts such a word has once and for all an accent and a flaw that it never lives down; if, then, this notwithstanding, it should claim to be a substantive and demand to be declined in all five cases, it would be genuinely comic. So it goes with the individual also when he, perhaps extracted from the womb of time laboriously enough, wants to be absolute in this enormous relativity. But if he surrenders this claim, is willing to be relative, then he eo ipso has the tragic, even if he were the happiest individual—indeed, I would say the individual is not happy until he has the tragic.