KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 5. Midnight.)

I've read somewhere (the Lowrie introduction?) that in Quidam's diary the 5th of each month includes important entries devoted to recollection of events prior to his engagment. This accounts for yet another shift in tone (this one is, of course, less distracting because it is supposedly written down two days later. The tone isn't radically altered within a single paragraph, as it was in the previous entry.

The five paragrahps are even given a title, Quiet Despair.

When Swift became an old man, he was committed to the insane asylum he himself had established when he was young. Here, it is related, he often stood in front of a mirror with the perseverance of a vain and lascivious woman, if not exactly with her thoughts. He looked at himself and said: Poor old man!

I thought this might be Jonathan Swift, the English satirist who authored 'Gulliver's Travels. In the appendix, an earlier version of this passage includes the descriptor 'Englishman', but the Catholic Encyclopedia here indicates a Dean Swift who opened an insane asylum in Dublin in 1745. Jonathan Swift is in fact rumored to have gone mad before he died, and the date of this death is 1745. If anyone can pin this down as a certainty, I would certainly be interested in knowing. Not that it matters a great deal, but this anecdote reminds me a little of Chekov's great story Ward No. 6, in which a psychiatrist is eventually locked up as a patient in the very asylum where he had ministered to patients.

The next three paragraphs resonate somewhat with Kierkegaard's biography; has any scholarship has been done on the correspondence between this passage and sections of the Journal that concern his father?

The scope of the last paragraph expands greatly with the attention to the 'silence of eternity'.

Then the son also became an old man; but just as love devises everything, so longing and loss taught him - not, of course, to wrest any communication from the silence of eternity - but it taught him to imitate his father's voice until the likeness satisfied him. Then he did not lok at himself in the mirror, as did the aged Swift, for the mirror was no more, but in loneliness he comforted himself by listening to his father's voice: Poor child, you are in a quiet despair. For the father was the only one who had understood him, and yet he did not know whether he had understood him; and the father was the only intimate he had had, but their intimacy was of such a nature that it remained the same whether the father was alive or dead.

After reading it again it occurs to me that it is also a meditation on the hereditary nature of original sin. More importantly (at least to the structure of the diary), it offers an explanation for the depression which he has worked so hard to guard against. The depression which led him to break off the engagement. So in this 'single, existing individual,' Quidam, we can see not just one, but two strategies developed in the diary. One is the recollection of his broken engagment; another is a kind of depth psychology that he works out on the 5th of each month. So far, anyway; maybe there's more.