But in any event let us adopt the Calderónian formula in _La Vida es Sueño_:
_Que estoy soñando y que quiero obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde el hacer bien aun en sueños_[54]
But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderón know? And he added:
_Acudamos a lo eterno que es la fama vividora donde ni duermen las dichas no las grandezas reposan_[55]
Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith, for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_.
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically.
And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can.
Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die, a practical truth.
For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of any great value.
And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons, and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something that is within the reach of all.