KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 20. Midnight.)

What exactly does Quidam mean by a third party? Perhaps he simply means an objective perspective, or someone to act as an intermediary, or referee, for the relationship. Marriage counseling was not so available in 1850, much less 1750, as it is in 2005.

If a third party did think about my love relationship, or someone else – for when all is said and done I am perhaps the only one who thinks about it and am not even a second party on the subject. But that, after all, is what I want and what I am fighting for.

I’m not sure what Quidam/Kierkegaard means by this, but what follows makes perfect sense for the narrator:

Yet it is alarming to think this way in the stillness of the night. All existence thereby becomes somewhat askew, somewhat turned around, and thereby somewhat weird.

What I think Q/K is writing about here is the spookiness that exists on the brink of solipsism. I say ‘brink’ because within the solipsistic state it can feel as if one is always approaching the edge of being itself, while the reality may well be that one is already in a kind of free fall. Or maybe the opposite, as if one were wandering around desert flats in complete darkness, without so much as a ditch to fall into. That’s my stab at what he means by ‘weird’, anyway.

Referring to the third party again, he writes:

A third party, be it a stage hairdresser, a silk, wool, and linen merchant, a young girl at a finishing school, to say nothing of the gentleman who write short stories and novels – a third party wold be informed at once.

And now the term is a little more clear to me. I’m reminded of a passage in Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, in which he asks how it is that a person can can remain a stranger to himself his entire life, and yet someone else can size him up in a matter of seconds. I think this observation came by way of Kierkegaard, if not Quidam. Perhaps we should keep track of all the different ways Percy’s work resonates with passages in Stages.

And a Bible passage is nevertheless always something, but one word from her, a comment she did not know she made about the tea, that is little. Yet it is indeed possible that a secret lay therein – it is just possible. Who but me understands this? But I do, after all, have a support in myself, for who would ever dream that I could be such as I am. Ergo - yes, it is correct, absolutely correct: it is possible. It is possible that she was just as skilled in reflection as I am. Indeed, if my honor and my pride, my depression, did not put the thumbscrews on me, I would hardly feel the force of this syllogism.

This is a difficult passage, but it’s also fairly representative. Something drawn from daily life, contemplation of possibility, heated ravings with special attention to himself and a kind of super rational thought process that seems most likely to turn up even more heated ravings.

I do think I have a better idea of what Quidam wants. His beloved should be just as reflective as he is, and perhaps he will he only go through with the marriage if she is. Otherwise he, or she, or both of them would then be unhappy. Even miserable. And a miserable marriage is hell.

The last paragraph is also telling for the attention to his relationship with God, and how sharply this is contrasted with his relationship to erotic love.

When I read in the poets the speeches of lovers, I smiled because I could not understand that such a relationship could occupy them so much. The eternal, a relationship with God, a relationship to the idea – this stirred my soul, but I could not grasp something so immediate. Now – well, now I am suffering, I am doing penance, even if I am not suffering in a purely erotic way.