KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 12. Morning.)

My jaw sagged open as I read the first paragraph of the next entry:

A year ago today. It is settled. So they did not make the testing period long for me. Well, I needed that, for I am very exhausted. O possibility, you sinewy, agile athlete, in vain one tries to lift you off the ground in order to take away our strength, for you can be stretched as long an eternity and yet keep your footing; in vain one tries to put you at a distance, for you are one's self. Yes, I know that you will still be the one who some day takes my life, but not this time. Let go of me, you withered hag, whose embrace is revolting to me as was the forest hag's to Roland's squires. Shrivel up to the nothing that you are, lie there like a wind-dried grass snake until once again you come to life and once again become tough and elastic and able to eat away at my soul! At this moment your power is broken. The testing period is over - if only it has not been too short, if only no one hurried her into making a resoultion, if only they made the whole matter difficult enough for her.

Mind-bending prose here, turning Possiblity into the kind of allegorical divinity that C.S. Lewis analyzed so well in his Allegory of Love. What I think is happening here is a re-write of Kierkegaard's own diaries, by which he was able to gain some perspective regarding the anxiety that he felt in the wake of his engagement to Regine. I'm not really familiar enough with SK's journals to say one way or the other, but I can't help but think that he's reaching quite beyond himself (er ... within himself) to uncover the uncomfortable psychological truth about his dilemma through the mask of his pseudonym, Quidam. It reads almost like a parody, with a kind of hyperlyrical power I haven't read since Charles Kinbote escaped from his Zemblan castle in Pale Fire. Okay, so, apart from its lyrical power, what does it actually mean? What sort of test is he undergoing? It's hard to tell, for all the obfuscatory lyricism, but presumably he is waiting for the response to his proposal. And there is more lyricism:

The first kiss - what bliss! A girl with a joyful temperament, happy in her youth! And she is mine. What are all dark thoughts and fancies but a cobweb, and what is depression but a fog that flies before this actuality, a sickness that is headed and is being headed by the sight of htis health, this health that, after all, is mine since it is hers, is my life and my future. Riches she does not have; this I know, I know it very well, nor is it necessary either, bu she can say, is as an apostle said to the paralytic, "Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you; stnad up, be well!"

With the biblical quotes it is hard to see how he isn't on the verge of some religious revelation, but perhaps for someone brought up in religious tradition all great moments come to seem religious, or at least intensely otherly, as this first kiss does for Quidam here. Depression comes up again here. Is there a cure for the depression other than eros? I wonder. Somewhere in Method in Theology Lonergan (Jesuit theologian) writes of the eros of knowlege, so I wonder if even celibacy is an exclusion.

The last paragraph brings to mind previous mentions of 'the fullness of time":

If yesterday I became ten years older, today I become ten years younger - no, younger than I have ever been,. Is this a crisis? Is this the wavering of decision? Estne adhuc sub judice lis [Is the case perhaps still before the court] Have I really become ten years older, I who was almost an old man - the poor girl, who has to nurse one who is dead; or have I become young as I never was young - what an enviable fate to be able to be as much to a person.

Perhaps I am wrong, but after reading this I marvel at SK's (or at least Quidam's) wisdom in breaking off the engagement.