Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  Today I accidentally heard from a cabdriver that her father had hired a carriage to drive about forty miles out to a country manor. What could he want there, he who almost never goes beyond the city ramparts except when riding horseback, and then four miles at most, he who has no connections out in the country. —Just suppose—the phrase rings in my memory, and the drill exercises commence. The drill exercises! Suppose she really has made a decision, suppose she insists on being offended, wants it to be in the open, wants to despair and to have a distinctive form of desperation.

  Good God! Only not this, everything else, only not this! [VI 241] Cursed be wealth and earthly tinsel and being or seeming to be somebody important in the eyes of the world! Would that I were a workhouse inmate, a poor wretch of a man, then the misrelation would be something else again. True enough, in the eyes of the world I am a scoundrel. In the eyes of the world—what are the eyes of the world but blindness, and what is the world’s verdict? I have not found ten men who are capable of judging rigorously. Or am I not honored and esteemed as before, do I not enjoy more recognition than before, and in the eyes of the world is this not the necessary qualification, the justification for being a scoundrel, or at least for having an extraordinary ingenium [natural talent] for becoming one? Let it choose between an abandoned girl who bows her innocent head in sorrow and seeks a hiding place in the country so that she can grieve—and an actor in the theater of life, a brazen fellow who keeps his head up and defies everybody with his proud eyes—the world’s choice is soon made. A man is given a lifelong fine for an accidental injury, but I, I have no verdict pronounced on me. Condemned! I incite people against me, and they shout, “Bravo!”; I wait for them to kill me, and they carry me in triumph. I tremble, I doubt whether I have the strength and the courage to bear the world’s verdict, whether I do not owe it to myself to place myself in a better light, but I do not falter, and I pull the cord to the shower—and the world’s judgment is utterly favorable.

  But, merciful God, do not let this happen, do not let it happen. I despair, I wrestle with you, I rush out there, I win her once again, I give up everything in order to challenge with gold all the splendor of the manor house, I have a wedding, and I shoot myself on the wedding day.

  But I must go out there; I must see what he wants out there. Alas, I do not dare to ask anyone about anything, not for anything. It is easy enough to take the vow of silence when one would rather not have anything more to do with the world, but to have to be silent when one is as concerned as this!

  March 17. Midnight.

  False alarm. Right now I have driven a hundred miles in sixteen hours, I have been nearly dead with anxiety and impatience—and for nothing. My life has been endangered in a ludicrous way—and for nothing. A clumsy lout of a mail-coach [VI 242] driver falls asleep and the horses along with him. In a fury, I jump from the carriage and hit the fellow without taking into consideration that he was a giant compared with me. But what one will not do in such a mood! And then they praise the mail-coach service, and the special coach service! It is miserable. If Richard III would give his kingdom for a horse,146 I believe I would have given half my fortune for a team of runners. The coach driver threw me to the ground. It was no use to walk, I had to apologize, give him a big tip—and we drove on.

  The whole thing is a private matter. There is a farm to rent, and a man in Jylland has a son who wants to rent it. The father is an old friend of her father, and he is out there now to obtain some information about the terms.

  How can a brain stand all this! This is a higher and rougher sea than is known in the Atlantic Ocean, for the swell swings between nothing and the most dreadful of all.

  March 20. Morning.

  A year ago today. No new symptom. Whether this security and stillness are a good sign I do not know; whether in the spiritual sense this is growing weather and the beautiful flower is sprouting in secret or whether stormy weather is brewing, I do not know; I do not even dare to investigate lest I do it prematurely and thereby disturb.

  March 20. Midnight.

  147There is no time at all to think about myself, and yet my inner life is such that it can provide enough to think about. I am really no religious individuality; I am just a regular and perfectly constructed possibility of such a person. With a sword hanging over my head, in peril of my life, I discover the religious crises with a primitivity148 such as if I had not known of them before, with such a primitivity that if they had not been discovered I would have to discover them. But this is unnecessary; in that regard I can jumble and discipline myself as I once consoled a somewhat slow-witted man of whom another [VI 243] jokingly said: He won’t invent gunpowder. I answered: That is not necessary, after all, since it has been invented. But it is one thing to learn from the catechism and memorized lessons, and it is one thing to be able to recite to the pastor, indeed, even to the bishop when he makes a visitation, and it is one thing to be able to hold forth like a preacher—primitivity in appropriation is quite another thing.149 It is good that I do not have to teach others. I gladly pay the church dues and also put money in the offering plate; fortunate is the person who is so sure of himself that he dares to accept money for teaching.

  As possibility, I am all right, but when at the turning point I want to appropriate the religious prototypes [Forbilleder], I encounter a philosophical doubt 150that I would not express as such to one single person. What it depends upon is the element of appropriation. Predisposed as I am, at the turning point of the religious crisis I reach for the paradigm, but look, I cannot understand the paradigm at all, even though I venerate it with a childlike piety that does not want to abandon it. The one paradigm appeals to visions, another to revelations, the third to dreams. To talk about it, to inflame the presentation with imagination and yet retain the presupposition, the presupposition that specifically involves the appropriation element for the one who comes later, is easy enough—but to understand it!

  If someone realizes his religious need so deeply that he presumably could even do without the pastor and then has a philosophical skepticism that exactly matches it, the prospects are not quite the best. But if I only manage to get through that year of mourning when I shall mourn for her (and my year of mourning is not defined astronomically, it can come to be five and ten years and my whole lifetime, but it is defined by her), then I can plunge into these conflicts, and things will go all right. I am determined to persevere to the end; I will not run away from it. 151I will not be clever with phrases by which one deceives, like schoolboys who in the front of the book write “See the middle,” and in the middle write “See the end of the book,” and at the end of the book jeer at the one who was tricked. It is my conviction that the will is of primary importance even in connection with thinking, that talents ten times as good without an energetic will do not constitute as good a thinker as talents ten times as poor combined with an energetic will: the superb talents help to understand much, the energetic will helps to understand the one thing. But just because a person wants to persevere and will persevere does not mean that one becomes a yodeling saint who, when he contemplates [VI 244] the course of life and of existence and world history, looks at it, and see, it is so wonderful.152 Just let him look at life and world history and see that it is so wonderful—when I look at him, I see that he is a blockhead for sure, just like the preacher who does an entrechat in the pulpit153 in honor of Christianity, or becomes so earnest that he is as amusing as the pastor in the snuffbox.154 Stupidity or sweating and getting red in the face is no more earnestness (because the sweater is so stupid he is not even able to laugh) than silly gaping is religiousness. If I know nothing else, I do know that the comic ought to be used to keep order in the sphere of the religious. Aberration should not be called hypocrisy but stupidity. Calling a person a hypocrite helps him, inasmuch as it acknowledges that he has a relationship with God. 155A pathos-filled indignant rage at speculation’s embezzlement and systematic cheating, which like the Roman proconsuls drains the pro
vinces and enriches itself, makes the system rich and life empty. Obviously what is sorely needed is a good comic drawing of a religious enthusiast. A skipper can go on swearing all day without giving it a thought, and in the same way an enthusiast can be solemn all day long without a complete or sound idea in his soul. That Gothic king refused to be baptized when he learned that he would not be together with his forefathers.156 The natives in America feared heaven more than hell and wished to remain pagans lest they be together with the orthodox Spaniards in heaven. Similarly, many an enthusiast, if he does nothing else, makes a person nauseated by the religious.

  About this conflict within me, I do not dare as yet to say “today,”157 but I feel that I owe her much with respect to venturing. The one who has made another person unhappy can be very useful for persevering in battles such as this: the one who is sentenced to life is given rasp work158 to do, which is mortally dangerous, but then, after all, he is condemned.

  This, too, I also realize—that the unmarried person can venture more in the world of spirit than the married, and risk everything and be concerned only about the idea, and is qualified in a totally different way to be in the discrimen [crucial moment] of decision, where it is almost impossible to stand, to say nothing of taking up residence. But definitely this was [VI 245] not my reason for not wishing to marry. 159Indeed, I, too, wished for a somewhat quieter happiness in life, and her beseeching made my own wish my one and only wish. And even if I had not wished it, I would have done it, because I always believe that obedience is more precious to God than cosmopolitan, philanthropic, patriotic sacrifices upon the altar of humanity,160 that quietness in the fulfilling of a modest duty is infinitely more valuable and more befitting to every human being than luxuriance in the world of the spirit and prodigality of concern for the whole human race, as if one were God in heaven. Let them talk vehemently about God’s wrath and the consuming fire161 —there is also something I fear and fear just as much, and that is that I might force God to pull rank on me, make me vanish as a lie before his stately and superior majesty. An enthusiast would probably find this expression is not earnest enough; he no doubt would want me to curse piously just as the skipper curses impiously. For me it has earnestness enough, and more terror in it than the sensate notions of an excited imagination. As soon as I disdain duty, God becomes exclusive, for only in duty am I in humble harmony with his sublimity, and therefore his majesty is not exclusive-ness. Therefore it is not God who makes himself exclusive, which he never does (this is paganism), but it is I who make him exclusive, and this is a punishment. This is the profound consistency: that the person who wants to come closer to God by disdaining what is simple, distances God in his exclusive-ness, in an exclusiveness that not even the most wretched of human beings has to experience. Here, too, I am quick of hearing, and even though many a philosopher who shouts to the world Δός μοι που στω̃; [Dos moi pou sto; Give me a place to stand]162 does not hear it, I hear a voice that says: I will give you your Dosmoi, you dunces [Dosmere]!

  No! If I had not believed that I had a divine counterorder, I never would have retreated, and as soon as this order is revoked I shall choose my wish again. 163God forbid that the effort and the tension weaken my wish before this is allowed! My counterorder I can understand, for it goes through repentance. A repentant individuality who is able to take a whole lifetime to recant cannot advance. This is a very simple protest against a marriage. I have neither visions nor dreams to guide me; my collision is quite simply the collision of repentance with existence, a collision of suspension with a present [VI 246] actuality. Until it is resolved, I am in suspenso; as soon as it is resolved, I am free again. This is why I am doing all I can to keep myself at the pinnacle of love. As soon as she is free, the religious crises are my task.

  Just suppose, to think quite theoretically, suppose that she found herself again; just suppose that the remark about death had been only an exaggeration, not intended as a pathos-filled reply but something like the utterance when one says in the course of a conversation: I am almost dying from the heat in this cramped apartment. Just suppose she had meant it but did not understand herself, or suppose she had suffered unto death but had been victorious; just suppose I had contributed a little to this victory or nothing at all; 164just suppose she seized the defense that she had never cared about me at all—what then? Then I would have cared about her more than ever. Good God, as if this were possible! How my soul snatches at every explanation from this quarter! Even if in some of these instances it would make me sorry for her, I ask no.more. Then I would have suffered more than she; I ask no more. I would have taken the girl’s partes [role], would have been better at the task of sorrowing, or at least just as good; I ask no more. I did not leave her in order to become the lead dancer in a public dance hall or the lead lover in a perpetual Friendship Society.165 What for her has had no meaning, or perhaps only as a decision in the temporal realm, for me has had eternal meaning. I regret nothing, not a tear, not a single one, that I have shed for her sake; I am not ashamed of it, for it is not unmanly to be able to cry, but it is effeminate to be unable to conceal it from everyone. Indeed, if there were a scoffer who had counted every tear (oh, what a contemptible thing to do, how deceived the poor fellow is who counts the tears that soothe my soul!), suppose the number were great, suppose he were to mention the number in order to ridicule me: a man who weeps!—I will not regret them. If I were to die tomorrow, my existence would still be an epigram that makes any epitaph superfluous. I do not regret it; she has indeed benefited me, benefited me infinitely, simply by a rash word and an exaggerated expression.

  You see, if this was the situation, then my position becomes difficult in an odd way. I would have to have a human life on my conscience in order to be awakened and torn out of the lethargy of depression. I humble myself under the earnestness [VI 247] of this thought. But then along comes my understanding and says: No, this is not true; you perceived, of course, that it was not a question of a human life, it was your imagination that created this hallucination and showed it to your depression, and both agreed that it was indeed possible. But then it was not a human life; it was a word that you perhaps would even have laughed at in many another’s mouth. Yes, in one sense that is true. And yet I regret nothing; I do not regret having suffered all this pain, which nevertheless has not yet paralyzed me, although it would do that if I were to talk about it. I have felt it in loneliness, in sleeplessness, when in one second one can think more thoughts together than one can write in months, when the imagination conjures up anxieties with which no pen dares to become involved, when the conscience gives a start of alarm and terrifies with optical illusions.

  But, alas, all this is indeed only a theory.

  March 25. Morning.

  A year ago today.

  166What is the happiest life? It is that of a young girl sixteen years old, when she, pure and innocent, possesses nothing, neither a chest of drawers nor a tall cupboard, but makes use of the lowest drawer of her mother’s bureau to hide all her treasures: a confirmation dress and a hymnbook. Fortunate is he who possesses no more than he could manage with the next drawer.

  What is the happiest life? It is that of a young girl sixteen years old, when she, pure and innocent, indeed can dance but goes to a ball only twice a year.

  What is the happiest life? It is that of a young girl sixteen summers old, when she, pure and innocent, sits busy at her work and still has time to steal a glance at him, at him, who owns nothing, neither a chest of drawers nor a tall cupboard, but is only a copartner in the shared wardrobe, and nevertheless has a completely different explanation, since in her he possesses the whole world, although she possesses nothing at all.

  And who, then, is the unhappy one? It is that rich young man, twenty-five winters old, who lives across the street.

  If someone is sixteen summers old and another sixteen winters, are they not the same age? Alas, no! Why not? Is the time not the same when it is the same? Alas, no! The tim
e is not the same.

  Alas, why were nine months in the womb enough to make me an old man! Alas, why was I not swaddled in joy? Why [VI 248] was I born not only in pain but to pain?167 Why were my eyes opened not to what is happy but only to peer into that kingdom of sighs and to be unable to tear myself away from it?

  March 27. Midnight.

  To grasp a theory is just like embracing a cloud instead of Juno,168 and it is also unfaithfulness to her. But to use the theory as a means of exercising, to unbuckle the soul in it so as to give one’s energy new elasticity, that is permissible—indeed, it is what one ought to do. After that kind of strengthening I am once again entirely hers, entirely. If I no longer hold her in my embrace, I nevertheless still embrace her, for the task of recollection in the morning hours and the rescue attempt at midnight do, after all, constitute a kind of embrace in which she is inclosed. The rescue attempt—can it really be called that? 169Indeed, even if I had everything in readiness, of what use is it if I dare not use it? Even if I were ever so willing, of what use is it if I am bound, and keeping myself bound is the only thing that can possibly help her a little? If only I dared to get myself afloat, I would promptly be there in my boat, if it could somehow be of any help to her, for it is possible, of course, that what would have rescued her at one time has no significance at all for her now. It is unbelievable how many avenues of escape possibility knows, especially for the person who does not dare to set foot on a single one of them, for then there would be one fewer, indeed, perhaps several fewer. And yet it is a rescue attempt.

  What a strange power a single word has when, as in this case, it does not accommodate itself in the context of a speech or a sentence, so that one pays attention to it only in passing, but without linguistic connection it stares at one with the incitement of an enigma and the assiduousness of anxiety! I am as depressed as if there were another kind of real truth in this word, as if I were floating on the rush-fringed lake one quiet evening, as if I heard her scream, and I took to the oars—and I saved her life, but she never became a human being again. Anxiety and pain and perplexity would have slowly picked at the lock of consciousness until despair managed to dissipate [VI 249] the lovely nature of this lovable womanliness.170 Terrible! Do I not dare to order this thought to take flight? Do I not dare to ask that this thought might be taken away from me? No! After all, it is a possibility. And yet if I were just sitting with her, just that I dared to be in her presence, that I dared to do everything even if it is nothing—that would still be a relief, a relief that, like a smoldering, is an uninterrupted dull pain but not so much a suffering. Then she would confuse everything; she would believe that as before we were sitting in the boat on that lake we sailed together, and then we would exchange, if not winged words, then expressions of madness, and would understand each other in madness, and speak of our love as Lear wanted to speak with Cordelia about the royal household and ask for news from it.171 —But to be separated from her! And if she died—then the one who was nearest and dearest, perhaps the only one who had a whole lifetime, be it short or long, to mourn for her, he would be the only one not seen among the mourners or, rather, he would be prevented from riding in the carriage when the funeral procession followed her to the grave, even though he would know as well as anyone that one who is dead is the most powerful of all!