Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard 63

plicable way in which love seizes on its prey. Who, indeed, would not be alarmed if people about one, time and again, dropped down dead, all of a sudden, or had convulsions, without any one being able to account for it? But precisely in this fashion does love invade life, only with the difference that one is not alarmed thereby, since the lovers themselves regard it as their greatest happiness, but that one, on the contrary, is tempted to laugh ; for the comical and the trag- ical elements ever correspond to one another. Today, one may converse with a person and can fairly well make him out — ^tomorrow, he speaks in tongues and with strange ges- tures: he is in love.

Now, if to love meant to fall in love with the first person that came along, it would be easy to understand that one could give no special reasons for it ; but since to love means to fall in love with one, one single person in all the world, it would seem as if such an extraordinary process' of sin- gling out ought to be due to such an extensive chain of rea- soning that one might have to beg to be excused from hear- ing it — not so much because it did not explain anything as because it might be too lengthy to listen to. But no,- the lovers are not able to explain anything at all. H e has seen hundreds upon hundreds of women; he is, perhaps, ad- vanced in years and has all along felt nothing — and all at once he sees her, her the Only one, Catherine. Is this not comical? Is it not comical that the relation which is to explain and beautify all life, love, is not like the mustard seed from which there grows a great tree,^* but being still smaller is, at bottom, nothing at all ; for not a single ante- cedent criterion can be mentioned, as e.g., that the phenom- enon occurred at a certain age, nor a single reason as to why he should select her, her alone in all the world — and that by no means in the same sense as when "Adam chose Eve, because there was none other."^^'

Or is not the explanation which the lovers vouchsafe just as comical; or, does it not, rather, emphasize the comical aspect of love? They say that love renders one blind, and

i*C/. Matthew 13, 31 etc.

15A quotation from Musasus, Volksmdrchen der Deutachen, III, 219.