KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 17. Midnight.)

Here Quidam's organization is made explicitly clear (of course Jonathan made it clear earlier): the 'the night thoughts' are his diary for the current year. I won't be quoting the entire entry here, as my hands are tired, but one of the first sentences caught my attention:

If a human being had invented language, I would believe that he had invented this phrase to ridicule me.

Curious. When Adam gave names to all the animals, was he inventing language? Or did he speak in the language with which God first spoke to him? Why does Kierkegaard (er...Quidam) go to such a rhetorical extreme? At times there seems to me in Kierkegaard a longing for humiliation much like the moth's longing for the flame. However, there at times also seems to me something inherently prophetic about language itself, so that even in the isolation of a diary words can assume an almost conspiratorial obscurity as our fate and freedom are somehow worked out ex verbis, despite our best attempts at finding them elsewhere. At least that's how I interpret his anxiety at the words 'the current year', and perhaps some of the nature of his religious crisis.

The grisly punishment described in the rest of the paragraph perhaps points back to the ambiguity described in a previous entry, in addition to the pain he feels at time passing.

There follows more reflection on cunning and scheming. As I've said before, I think Quidam's fear of being found out is actually a kind of protection of her, as she would be drawn into the same misery were she to become aware of the lengths to which he's gone in order to conceal his anxiety and depression. The last sentence remains something of a mystery to me:

"It might lead her in false hope out into the indeterminable and let her be saved - that is, perish, be lost in half measures."

By 'indeterminable' does he mean the same sort of ambiguity that he is suffering under? If so, how is she 'saved'? Why 'lost in half measures'?

In the next paragraph Kierkegaard has more to say about 'inclosing reserve,' although he here he writes about how to estimate the extent of his inclosure, as if this person were someone other than himself:

One is silent - he is annoyed at the lull, betrays more and more, if not by anything else, then by his eagerness to conceal. But when one knows this, then one performs one's exercises in time. And the art is to speak about it a little (for complete silence is unwise) and thus deftly to keep a consuming passion in firm control of the conversation so that, just like an equestrian, one can guide it with a sewing thread and, just like a driver, swing around in a figure eight.

Is he suggesting that this is how others should handle him? Or is he really referring to someone else, as if he were saying that 'it takes one to know one.'

In the next paragraph Quidam gives us a number of abstractions and metaphors that illustrate this inclosing reserve:

"To scheme is a distraction..."
"To have passion as a gambler has..."
"To have the soul full of reckless courage and the mind of plans..."
"To have passion as a fisherman has..."
"To have in your power the one who could tell everything..."
"To have to be satisfied with a chance word from a maidservant..."
"To have to make soup from a sausage peg..."

and then at the end,

"If a person were going to confide in someone and then dared to choose only the one whom he could not trust - that is, to confide in him in the form of a deception."

Some of those analogies are supposed to reverse the sentiment of the one previous, so perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that the paragraph ends in an odd leap into the irrational.

And if that last sentence seems a headlong leap into the irrational, what is to be made of the next paragraph?

The only person I actually manage to learn anything from is a long way from being in my service. Yet we have a secret understanding. He knows everything; he is perhaps the most dependable of all. Fortunately he hates me. If possible, he will torture me - indeed, that I understand. he never says anything directly, never mentions any names, but tells me such strange stories. At first I did not understand him at all, but now I know that he is talking about her but using fictitious names. he believes I have sufficient imagination to understand every allusion, and that I do, but I also have enough sense to pass it off as nothing. Yet I must count on his being maevolent.

To whom is he speaking? I can think of no one besides the beloved's father, but that doesn't make much sense either.. In the next paragraph he again imagines her death and his arrest for murder, but then subverts that by referring to this justice as a travesty:

Human justice, after all, is just nonsense, and three authoritiies only make the joke boring. The prossecuting attorney and the defense attorney are like Harlequin and Pierrot, and justice is like Jeronymus or Cassandra, who are led by the nose. Everything here is ludicrous, including the guards who parade at the execution. The executioner is the only acceptable character.

My hunch at this point is that Quidam is seeking a life or death decision (or is emphasizing the life or death drama already invoked by his beloved) in order to invest it with religious significance.

In the final three paragraphs he switches back and forth between posturing as Don Quixote or as a perfidious rogue, before winding it all up with a quotation from Shakespeare's Cymbeline. I'm sure I've missed most of what he intends with this, but it does seem to me that he is obliquely referring to the difficulty in existing in inclosing reserve.

... a language that sensu eminenti then has the characteristic that if a person cannot speak it fluently he cannot speak it at all - that is, it simply does not exist for him.

Well, I've been working on this passage for a month, and it's still pretty opaque. More anon.