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Yet this does not happen in such a way that we first run through individual things including ourselves, and then evaluate them in accordance with whether they are still of any worth to us. That is absolutely impossible. It is in itself impossible to accomplish such a thing, quite apart from the fact that it is factically not the case. This indifference of things and of ourselves with them is not the result of a sum total of evaluations; rather each and every thing at once becomes indifferent, each and every thing moves together at one and the same time into an indifference. This indifference does not first leap from one thing over onto another like a fire, so as to consume each thing; rather all of a sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference. Beings have-as we say-become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves as these people are not excepted. We no longer stand as subjects and suchlike opposite these beings and excluded from them, but find ourselves in the midst of beings as a whole, i.e., in the whole of this indifference. Beings as a whole do not disappear however, but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference. The emptiness accordingly here consists in the indifference enveloping beings as a whole.

Before we ask how we must grasp this emptiness more closely and how, correspondingly, being left empty is to be determined, we shall summarize our interpretation of profound boredom thus far. We are considering a third boredom which is meant to bring us closer to the depths of the essence of boredom, not by way of a construction of boredom in terms of time (which must be possible in principle) but in the same way as with the previous forms. From the outside this looks as though we have simply compiled an arbitrary list of the variations of boredom in general. And yet we have already seen a certain criterion for connecting these forms: their becoming more profound. Continuing in the same direction, as it were, we are now attempting to consider a third form, which we encapsulate in the designation 'it is boring for one'. 'It', 'for one'-this already expresses the fact that in this instance there is not some particular boring thing there, but also the fact that we ourselves in a particular comportment familiar to us in our everydayness are not at issue either. It expresses the fact that what is individual about us ourselves and familiar to us recedes, and is made to recede in this way by boredom itself. This already means that in this boredom we do not carry out some abstraction, for instance, on the basis of which we generalize ourselves from a particular individual ego to a universal ego in general. Boredom in the form of 'it is boring for one' already approaches us more closely if we note that passing the time is missing from it. This being missing is no mere absence or forgetting of passing the time, but emerges from boredom itself by way of our here no longer permitting any passing the time in general. This means that we abandon ourselves to this boredom as something that becomes overpowering in us and which we understand in a certain way in this overpowering, without being able to explain it