There exists a weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our life - our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself.

Instead of forgetting itself in the essential levity of a smile, where existence is effected innocently, where it floats in its fullness as though weightless and where, gratuitous and graceful, its expansion is like a vanishing, in weariness existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an unrevokable contract.

One has to do something, one has to aspire after and undertake.


...Weariness is the impossible refusal of this ultimate obligation. In weariness we want to escape existence itself, and not only one of its landscapes, in a longing for more beautiful skies. An evasion without an itinerary and without an end, it is not trying to come ashore somewhere. Like for Baudelaire's true travellers, it is a matter of parting for the sake of parting.

emmanuel levinas
- existence and existents

he said it better than i could.