KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 15. Morning.)

Is this the way it is to be mother? wailed Rachel when the twins' struggle began in her womb, and many a person presumably has said this to himself when he obtained what he craved: Is this the way it is?

And is it not as if there were two natures struggling within me: have I become ten years older or have I become ten years younger?

It's worth noting that both of Rachel's twins, Jacob and Esau, were eventually born, but that even so the birthright was eventually confounded by Jacob so that he would be preeminent. Perhaps the analogy wasn't meant to extend so far, but it is interesting. The reference to ten years younger or older seems to be his way of expressing his own confoundment, but is it something more?

Perhaps he answers his own question in the next paragraph:

Yet how strange it must be to be a young girl, to enter into life so briskly. I believed that I would be released, that I would be changed, that I would have seen myself in love and by looking in love at her I would see myself saved - then I would have become like her, a bird on a branch, a song of joy in youth. I believed that we would have grown up together, that our life would be happy for us in our union and in its hapiness understandable to others, like a happy person's greeting as he hurries by and throws us a kiss.

To me this actually reads like a conflation of the two natures. As he wonders what it must be like to be a young girl, he is ten years younger (perhaps even more). His point, I think, is that he believed that the engagement would turn him into a person more like his beloved, and if I understand him correctly, that 'her' happiness would then enable them to embark on a lifetime of 'their' happiness and even his happiness. I think Wodehouse somewhere describes it as 'dancing on air,' something very close to Kierkegaard's kiss-blowing fiancee. And I wonder if that is the first time those two authors have ever appeared in the same sentence.

The next paragraph is one I've always liked, having seen it only by itself, although even now I'm not sure how it fits in with the paragraphs preceding it.

...to live a mixture of wisdom and folly and not rightly know which is which. If a jeweler who had become such an expert in genuine precious stones that distinguishing them was his life - if he saw a child who was playing with various stones, genuine and imitation, which the child mixed together, and had equal joy from both kinds - I think the fewler would shudder to see the absolute distinction cancelled; but if he saw the child's happiness, his happy mood in his play, he perhaps would humble himself under it and be fascinated by this appalling sight.

He explains:

Similarly, for the immediate person there is to absolute distinction between the idea that bursts into thought and language, as des the precious stone in its radiance, and the idea in which this is lacking. There is no absolute distinction that makes the one into the most precious of all and the other into nothing, the one into that which defines everything and the other into what cannot even be defined in relation to this.

Interesting that in the last sentence he writes, "If only she does not begin to reflect!" - in other words, 'if only she does not do what I have just done, which is to imagine herself as the other!' By wishing for this, is Quidam here denying her full humanity? Does he simply wish to keep her from the pain that he is too familiar with? This morning's entry is a bit of a puzzler, all the way around.

I'm not sure this helps, but here is a list of contrasts set up in this entry. I'm not sure that they actually fall into such an easy polarization (the relationship between Jacob and Esau characterizes this difficulty), but I think most of them line up.

a year ago / today
her / him
Jacob / Esau
ten years younger / ten years older
imitation / genuine
idea / language
happiness / pain