the temporal". This is what Constantin is trying to accomplish. He hopes that Repetition will become a new philosophical category. That it will trump Hegel and explain the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus. "Mediation” is a foreign word; “repetition” is a good Danish word, according to him. He reports that he has met a melancholic young man and has decided to become his confidant. He says, "an observer fulfills his duties well, he is to be regarded as a secret agent in a higher service, for the observer’s art is to expose what is hidden". During his conversation with the Young Man he comes to understand that he is in love but he talks about his love as though it were just a memory. He says the Young Man "was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship." His observations lead him to conclude that the young man really isn't in love, but that the girl (he never calls her a woman) is "the occasion that awakened the poetic in him and made him a poet." He calls him the "sorrowful knight of recollection’s only happy love." He has had his first love but that's not anywhere near the experience of marriage. Kierkegaard says the following in Either/Or, "The question, namely, is this: Can this love be actualized? After having conceded everything up to this point, you perhaps will say: Well, it is just as difficult to actualize marriage as to actualize first love. To that I must respond: No, for in marriage there is a law of motion. First love remains an unreal in itself that never acquires inner substance because it moves only in the external medium. In the ethical and religious intention, marital love has the possibility of an inner history and is as different from first love as the historical is from the unhistorical. This love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the moment it doubts it is annihilated; it is like a sleepwalker who is able to walk in the most dangerous places with the complete security but plunges down when someone calls his name. Marital love is armed, for in the intention not only is attentiveness directed to the surrounding world but the will is directed toward itself, toward the