How, then, do we move from finite frustrations to the kind of primal melancholy that puts the entire world into question?  The answer is simple: we do not move at all, but we are moved by the spirit that gives us melancholy as one of its most treasured gifts.  The transition from finite disappointments to the infinite power of melancholy is not a product of nature natured or any of its orders.  It is a gift of the spirit that moves to free us from our absolute dependence on the world, so that we can begin to fathom the abyss of nature naturing. We certainly understand finite grounds and abysses in the temporal order. But it is only with the flowering of melancholy, which initially appears as a poisoned fruit, that we begin to understand what it is to have all grounds removed. Yet this process also brings us toward that deeper ground that we hunger for in the lost object.      The ontological wound of the self, a product of the self-fissuring of nature naturing as it spawns nature natured, becomes more acutely felt as nature’s self enters into the elusive ground of the whence.  Melancholy can never be felt for a finite object within the world, but always points to the nonfinite domain of the elusive whence that produces dissatisfaction with all finite orders of meaning. The spirit moves the self toward the abyss that opens up the whence, thereby producing an awareness of the ontological wound that fails to heal under the conditions of finitude.  But the spirit moves in a healing way to both show the wound and point toward its possible amelioration in the posttemporal.  Without the experience of melancholy, which opens up a sense of the ontological difference, the self would have no chance of finding either the pretemporal or the posttemporal (p. 160).
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