KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 8. Morning.)

Three days away from his diary has evidently given Quidam some time to cool off, for it quickly becomes clear that he is nowhere near the fevered pitch of emotional frenzy that he’d maintained through most of the previous entry. Still, it isn’t all easygoing, and I suspect that there are cultural differences between 1846 (1746?) and now that make it even more difficult.

A year ago today I saw her at her uncle’s, where I was together with her. How secretively I brood over my love, how clandestinely I absorb the nourishment of love. And why so secretively? It certainly is not as if love needed the incitement of any mystification; but it is partly due to my being accustomed to it from an earlier time and even more from the time of preparation for this tentamen rigorosum [rigourous examination] and it is partly due to my thinking that I owe it to her. It is indeed indefensible for a man to misuse the more free association with the opposite sex that our milieu permits, as they say, to make passes.

After briefly noting that he has indeed actually spent time in the young woman’s company, Quidam begins his disquisition on the special joy of secret love. Some of this is the result of personal preference for mystification and some of it is what he feels he owes her as a gentleman.

I don’t have the Lowrie translation with me right now, but I wonder if he has done anything better with ‘make passes’.

The paragraph continues as Quidam disproves of flirtation and informs us that ‘language is in loving connivance with the prolixity of sorrow,’ and that whether she becomes his or not, his ‘judgment remains unchanged.’ His judgment of what? It can’t be to the sentences surrounding this statement, since they both concern the same question. I think it has something to do with his ‘interior being’; his shut-upness and desire to ‘leave nothing, not a trace, in the outer world.’

In the next paragraph he disavows any mystification or cunning in his efforts, and then gives us these extraordinary thoughts:

I do not know if cunning can ever be united with the erotic, but this I do know, that when one is struggling with God and with oneself whether to dare to follow the beckoning of love, whether to dare to reach for the desire that is the eye’s delight and the heart’s craving, then one is protected against this kind of going astray. But this is the reason I am so cautious, cautious to the very last moment – ah, what if there came to my interior being a counterorder that I should not have presumptuously intervened disturbingly there and I should not only have the pain of an unhappy love affair but would also have to make the retreat of repentance. If there were a magic word, if there were a rune that could make her mine, I do not know whether I would have sufficient earnestness with respect to the erotic, sufficient sensitivity, to see how ugly any such expedient is, sufficient strength to reject it, but this I do know, when one is bound as I am, one is not tempted.

A couple of comments. I would have thought that cunning and the erotic would go together well, but maybe I’ve misunderstood what he means by ‘the erotic.’ I was surprised to see him bring up G_d here, as that brings up the religious realm, but perhaps that is his intention. I’m not sure what he means by ‘counterorder’ here. He might be referring to the flirtation and cunning mentioned previously, employed for seducing the young woman into a love affair in an imaginary scenario. But he is bound by love (and perhaps by struggling with God), and therefore isn’t tempted to work by mystification and cunning.

I wonder whether the difference of 150+ years and some pretty heady cultural changes in the nature of relations between young men and women doesn’t get in the way here. SK writes of ‘the more free association with the opposite sex that our milieu permits’ but I wonder just how free that association would compare with your average courtship in 2005, to say nothing of assignations arranged through personal ads in The Stranger.

However, the fullness of time is approaching. For about a whole year now, ever since I realized I was in love with her (for prior to that time I had, of course, seen her), I have secretly and clandestinely been absorbed in this love. I have seen her at parties, seen her in her home; I have followed her path without bgeing observed. In a way the last was my favorite; partly because it satisfied the secrecy of love, partly because it did not make me uneasy with the fear that someone would discover it, which could affront her and prematurely snatch me, irresolute, out of the school of experience. This year, my year of preparation, has its own fascination for me.

This sounds a little creepy. While it might have been less so in Quidam’s time, the very fact that it is clandestine indicates that it isn’t entirely upright behavior. But the emphasis here is on the ‘secrecy of love,’ and certainly he is on to something here. The idea that lovers have some special knowledge, known only to them, is fairly universal, but what I find curious here is that Quidam experiences so much of this by himself. As if the object of his love need not have any of that experience herself.

Following this, Quidam gives another account of his stalking methods, and the cunning with which he’s able to deflect attention to his odd behaviour. He insists that the encounter with his associates couldn’t have had a happier outcome, but I’m not sure that as readers we are supposed to be entirely convinced. I certainly wasn’t. He ends with this sentence, which strikes me as a fairly good description for his purpose with this entry: ‘Oh, what a beautiful time, what fond recollection, what sweet unrest, what a happy sight – when I adorned my hidden life with the magic of love!’.

Next comes his account of a lesson on the subjunctive Quidam learned from his Latin master, which brings to mind Kierkegaard’s comment that he would like to have more indicative power. The sentiment here is opposite; young Quidam admires the multifarious moods expressed by the subjunctive and disdains the indicative mode of waiting as that experienced by a nameless messenger or cabdriver.

And yet it seemed to me that I was almost happier in my hiding place, to come so close to actuality, yet without actually being closer, results in distancing, whereas the distance of concealment draws the object to oneself. What if the whole thing were an illusion? Impossible. Why, then, do I feel happier in the distance of possibility? For the reason I myself have given; anything else is dark imagining.

It seems to me that this has been some pretty dark imagining, what with the near miss in the coffee shop and his clandestine absorption in a love affair that is only subjectively felt. His stated goal at the end of the passage is ‘to imagine everything lovable about her until [he] almost perish[es] from impatience. Doesn’t seem to make for much in the way of happiness, in any century.

It is here, however, that I think there some daylight can be seen between Quidam and Kierkegaard. If K is trying to show an individual struggling towards the religious, and that the religious is in the end ill-suited for the development of eros, then the portrait drawn of this psychological development really is extraordinary. K may well have experienced this self-torture himself, but he may also have become aware of it in the process of writing about it. The article referred to yesterday compares Quidam’s Diary to therapy, and now that comparison is beginning to seem more apt. It will be interesting to see where it all leads.