KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 3. Midnight.)

I think this particularly entry really sets the tone for the diary. It certainly sets up the title, for it is here that Quidam accuses himself of the crime that demands a verdict. This is clear enough, as is the vocabulary and the syntax with which it is expressed, although I cannot speak to how it reads in the original Danish (I mean the language, of course, but I’ll add that the pastries here at the Top Pot are really quite good). Anyhoo, the passage begins smoothly enough, but it soon becomes rather difficult, I think, on account of the extreme psychological state that Quidam is in during the recollection of their separation, which occurred some as yet unspecified time prior to this date. If I’ve ever doubted that Kierkegaard suffered greatly on account of his decision to break off his engagement with Regine, this passage more than quashes any such protests. (I’m dispensing with my usual caution in attributing Quidam’s thoughts and feelings to K.) To begin:

When a despairing person dashes through a side street of life in order to find peace in a monastery, he does well to consider first of all whether there is something in the circumstances of his life that for the time being binds him and makes it his first duty to work at getting another person afloat if that other one can be rescued. If he has given his all to this, then, even if he was not knighted in his lifetime, he places his hope on the honor that the Middle Ages granted the scholastic when he died – to be buried as a knight.

I think most of this can be understood with relative ease. Before one decides upon a celibate life, one should first consider whether life (perhaps God through the circumstances of a person’s life) might be asking him to help another in a way that precludes the peace to be found in a monastery. Because the modes are opposed, I’m fairly certain we can adduce that by this he is indicating marriage. ’If he has given his all to this’, then he has in fact attained the same spiritual reward (or perhaps the same degree of spiritual achievement) that he could have attained by dashing down that side street to enter the monastery. (Scholastics in the Middle Ages were monks). ‘To be buried as a knight’ recalls the ‘knight of faith’ from Repetition - the married man, if I recall, who goes about his quotidian existence with the zeal of the true believer who went out to conquer the Holy Lands in the Middle Ages. (Sidenote: what is apparent to me as I reread this is how much Kierkegaard is indebted to the culture of Medieval Catholicism to establish a grounding for faith, which has me wondering again why he didn’t turn to Aquinas and the actual scholastics who most clearly articulated that faith.)

So be calm. The point is to remain as apathetic and undecided as possible.

Huh? This is most definitely not clear. The tone has shifted, and perhaps something more than the tone. Is Quidam here making an initial judgment after the recollection of the event? Is he telling himself to remain calm because he thinks he may, after all, be deserving of a knight’s burial? Should he remain ‘as apathetic and undecided as possible’ during the engagement, or does he have something else in mind? Perhaps he is even pointing ahead to what he indicates in the next sentence:

After all, I am a murderer; I do indeed have a person’s life on my conscience! But then can one justifiably take refuge in a monastery? No! Ordinarily the only thing a murderer has to wait for is his verdict; I am waiting for a verdict that will decide whether I was a murderer, for she is indeed still living.

Gulp. Clear throat. Hmmm. Let’s see now … Can we perhaps back away? Slowly, cautiously … feeling for the doorknob … Damn! It’s locked; nothing to do but take it head on; nowhere to go but forward.

Okay then …

A few questions: What does ‘after all’ mean, exactly? That he does not deserve to be buried as a knight? And if so, why not? Because he broke the engagement? Perhaps he took advantage of the engagement?

What he writes is that he is a murderer; that a person’s life is on his conscience. Well then, okay, that makes sense. Not sure what it has to do with the monastery and medieval scholastics, but this certainly explains the shift in tone. It also explains the next sentence: a monastery can’t be expected to be a refuge for murderers. He will await his verdict elsewhere; it doesn’t really matter where, but it can’t be in a monastery. But then there is more:

I am waiting for a verdict that will decide whether I was a murderer,

I thought he had admitted to being a murderer, but now he seems to be waiting for someone else to decide. And why? Because,

she is indeed still living.

Huh? What in tarnation? How can he be a murderer if she is still living? Well, he means it figuratively: he murdered her hopes, or her dreams, or who knows what. And then we read this:

Oh, how dreadful if it was an exaggeration, a momentary mood, if it was the defiance of powerlessness that drew this word from her lips and the lips of those around her!

So he doesn't mean it figuratively. This seems almost preemptive, for an exaggeration is exactly what it seems to be, and Quidam does seem to be the victim of some pretty serious mood disorder that could now be diagnosed and treated with any one of several – many, really – available psychotropic stabilizers that have shown significant success with just a few (actually quite minor) side effects. In any event, these medications were available neither to Quidam in 17somethin-er-other or to Kierkegaard in 1846, so we’ll have to proceed as we had before.

The ‘it’ in ‘how dreadful if it was an exaggeration' puzzles me somewhat. I thought it was the marking of himself as murderer, but perhaps I am mistaken. I am not sure how ‘it’ could be confused with ‘the defiance of powerlessness’ either. Nor do I understand what ‘this word from her lips’ is supposed to be. It cannot be the ‘Yes’ to the request for engagement, as it was also drawn from the lips of those around her. Perhaps it is the verdict, ‘Guilty.’ Or something like it, such as ‘Cad.’ Perhaps she (and the others) were the first ones to call him ‘Murderer.’ I just, don’t, know.

Oh, what profound sneering at life if there was no one in the whole world except me alone who took that word seriously! My mind comes up with one suspicion after another, the demon of laughter is continually knocking; I know what it wants – it wants to whirl her off like an abracadabra. Depart from me, you unclean spirit! My honor, my pride order me to believe her; my depression is on the lookout for the most secret idea therein lest I be allowed to sneak away from something. She and the others who spoke have the responsibility for having said something terrible: it is my responsibility if I do not scrupulously stick to the word. After all, I am not an observer, not a counselor for the conscience, but one acting – that is, the guilty one. Consequently, my imagination is permitted to picture her in all her misery; my depression is permitted to lecture on the application: You are the murderer. If the first thing I said to myself at the time of the separation ever comes true: she chooses the scream; I choose the pain – if it ever comes true, I do not want to know it now and cannot know if it ever comes true.

After reading this I don’t feel any closer to understanding what ‘that word’ is. What are these suspicions that his mind comes up with? By ‘my mind’ I think we can understand that he is not in control of his thoughts at this point, which is probably why he hears the ‘demon of laughter’ knocking. Putting my jocular tone aside for a moment, this really is quite frightening. Quidam is on the verge of madness here, and it seems to be taking all his energy to keep himself on the rails. Nor is that demon alone; I think it is distinct from the ‘unclean spirit’ that would have him whirl her away like an abracadabra. But why? And To where? Not to the altar, I wouldn’t think; I would think it is too late for that. But perhaps that is the answer.

He mentions his depression again, the misery he was so reluctant to foist upon another. Here the depression seems to have an upside, insofar as it somehow seems to be tool employed for analysis. He has alluded to the positive side of depression before, near the end of the entry earlier that day: “From the bitterness of depression there is distilled a joy of life, a sympathy, an inwardness, that certainly cannot embitter life for anyone.” But she is in pain, so much so that he is able to write “she chooses the scream; I choose the pain”, so that they seem to almost united in a common condition, which I think must be the misery that he had hoped to avoid giving to another (specifically, to her). I could easily be wrong about this.

Oh, that she might not die; oh, that she might not be blighted! If it is possible, God in heaven, you indeed know, it was indeed and it is my one and only desire – if it ever should be possible and it is not too late!

While I’m not entirely sure what is meant here by ‘blighted,’ these sentences do seem to indicate that it was she who initially leveled the charge of murder against him. I also wonder if there might be a threat of suicide at work here; this would help explain the extreme emotional intensity so evident in her alleged reaction and here in his recollection. Another possibility is, again, that she ‘dies’ metaphorically and is ‘blighted’ because of the broken engagement. Perhaps a broken engagement amounts to an impeachment of character – comparable, maybe, to the logic behind Josheph’s offer to Mary when he found out that she was with child. The next sentences, I think, indicate the more severe response:

I saw her on the street yesterday afternoon. How pale, how suffering, how utterly like the figure of someone who summons one to appear in eternity. This almost glazed look, this trembling in my should because death is walking over my grave. And yet I do not with to forget any of it, not any; only to the faithfulness of an alarmed imagination that returns to me what has been confided more terrible than it was, only to the memory of a troubled conscience that sets a high interest rate on guilt, only to an honesty such as that will I and dare I entrust myself! - She is dying. How loathsome that I could believe for a moment the craftiness of the understanding or almost heed the demon of laughter – abominable!

I think that by ‘death is walking over my grave,’ Quidam refers to the reflection of the blight upon her (some kind of stigmatization, at any rate). The appearance of the ‘demon of laughter’ again indicates that Quidam is on the verge of madness – perhaps because he is on the verge of believing that it is all an awful game. And I’m fairly certain that this is what Regine accused Kierkegaard of – playing an awful game with her.

And yet perhaps she was so pale only because she saw me. Perhaps! What a mean tormentor resides in this word! Is it not as when a child has tortured a butterfly long enough and when in the next moment it is about to die the child pokes at it, and the butterfly for one second again snatches at life, snatches at freedom with its wings.

A truly frightening image; all the more so in the way it resonates with the idea that this all might be a game.

But if she does die, I cannot survive her; that I cannot do. But not a moment before, lest my death give her an explanation that I would certainly sacrifice my life to keep from her. So be cold, calm, composed, unchanged. Strangely enough, when I was courting her I was anxious lest I be too intriguing; now I am compelled to be that.

Suicidal or not, game or not, there is some kind of psychological brinksmanship being played here. Here we are brought back to the state of mind that has been mentioned before: calm depression, accompanied by the deception that Quidam surrounds that depression. It must, however, be obvious to writer and reader alike that she hasn’t trained herself, from childhood, and with the most rigorous exercises. Because she hasn’t had to. Until now. And that is why I think Quidam’s tone throughout this passage is warranted, however extreme it may seem.

Help, Korrektiv!