KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guilty? (January 26. Midnight.)

Alas, if it were possible, if it were possible! My God, every one of my nerves is probing, as it were, out in existence, they are feeling their way to see whether there would be some indication that we still might turn out to be suitable for each other, that until then I would have maintained the strength to keep my soul and my love at the peak of desire per tot discrimina. . .

The rest of the day's entry is much in the same vein, and it must be admitted that for Quidam it really isn't all that hysterical. A little overwrought, maybe, but I'm not sure he could be anything but. In a way, this is almost too easy to dismiss, but the strain to which I've become better attuned to as I read the diary is the degree to which Quidam is obviously suffering. This might be because when I read Kierkegaard I always have not just Percy but Auden in the background. Maybe even the foreground. Anyway, Auden has a nice essay on Kierkegaard and suffering in which he wrote,

Kierkegaard's polemic, and all his writings are polemical, moves simultaneously in two directions: outwardly against the bourgeois Protestantism of the Denmark of his time, and inwardly against his suffering. To the former he says, "You imagine that you are all Christians and contented because you have forgotten that each of you is an existing individual. When you remember that, you will be forced to realize that you are pagans and in despair." To himself he says, "As long as your suffering makes you defiant or despairing, as long as you identify your suffering with yourself as an existing individual, and are defiantly or despairingly the exception, you are not a Christian."

With that in mind, a sentence such as the following becomes much more interesting.

What a tremendous reward for all my misery! If the whole thing were to be but a day, if my wedding day and the day of my death were to be the same, what overpayment for all my toil and trouble, for what I, regarding the matter from a comic angle, have given up outwardly and what I, tragically suffering, call the overtime work of a prisoner! Ineffable bliss!

Maybe it's because we live in an age of narcissism, but a phrase like "I, tragically suffering" jumps off the page at me as an alert to beware of someone who cares a bit much - too much, or even much at the expense of others - of his own feelings. A certain amount of confidence is required to lay claim to 'tragic suffering', and I think it's only fair to not take language of this currency at face value. But it's also important to take the phrase that precedes it ("I, regarding the matter from a comic angle...") to get a better idea of what is intended here. Taken together, I think the passage illustrates Auden's point pretty well. And perhaps another that the poet made elsewhere (I think in an essay on Don Quixote), that to be a Christian is to understand one's self as an essentially comic figure. I think it's an appreciation of the comedic value of his own condition that leads him to write "Ineffable bliss!". Although I'm not convinced that for Kierkegaard it wasn't actually bliss of a more effable variety, or that there isn't a trace of bitterness in his appreciation of irony.

It's also interesting that the bleakness of the predicament (getting married and dying on the same day) is imagined (by an invented character, at that), and that the dialectical method he applies to comic and tragic sensibiliies seems to be spun out as much from his anxiety over that imaginary scenario as knowledge of his beloved. This is why it's good to keep in mind that this is Quidam rather than Kierkegaard, even if they do eventually converge. If it's just Quidam, he's obviously a mess. If it's Kierkegaard writing Quidam, he's at least a mess that understands himself as a mess.

And Quidam isn't entirely a mess; in the next paragraph he's able to write of his "deplorable bias, which has a sense only for the possiblities of unhappiness. . ."

Here's a sentence I don't understand:

Should I be afraid of confessing an unhappy love [Kjarlighed], should I change myself and my opinion of her because she changed toward me?

Are we to understand that she haschanged? Or is this change part of an imagined scenario? Is the Kjarlighed for her, or is it for his own method of inclosing reserve, the reward he mentions in a previous entry?

I like the last paragraph especially:

But for myself and for both of us, I still wish again my most blessed wish, which is beyond all measure and passes all understanding. Sleep well, my beloved, sleep well; stay with me in my dreams, stay with the lonely solitary, you heavenly perhaps with your ineffable bliss. And then to rest:

To bed, to bed who a beloved has
Who has none must also to bed.