Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  As soon as he was busy with his passionate research, generally at all times other than between eleven and twelve o’clock, to many people he did not seem mentally disordered, although it was precisely then that his disorder was most pervasive. And just as at the base of every scientific investigation there is an X that is sought, or, looked at from another side, just as the inspiration for the scientific investigation is an eternal presupposition, the certainty of which seeks its corroboration in the observation, so also did his troubled passion have an X that was sought, a law that indicated precisely the relation of resemblance in the family line, in order with its help to come to a more accurate conclusion. Hence it had a presupposition to which his imagination lent, for him, a sorrowful certainty that this discovery would confirm for him something sorrowful concerning himself.

  He was a son of a minor public official who lived in modest circumstances. At an early age he was employed in business by one of the richest merchants. Quiet, reserved, somewhat shy, he applied himself to his trade with an acumen and punctiliousness that soon led the head of the firm to realize that he was a very useful person. His free time was devoted to reading, practice in foreign languages, the development of a decided talent for drawing, and a daily visit to his parental home, where he was the only child. He went on living this way, unacquainted with the world. As an office employee he had favorable arrangements, and soon he was receiving a considerable annual salary. If it is true, as the English say, that money makes virtue, then it is also true that money makes vice. The youth, however, was not tempted, but as the years passed he became more and more a stranger to the world. He himself was quite unaware of it, for his time was always filled. Only once did an intimation of it dawn in his soul; he became a stranger to himself, or to himself he seemed to be like someone who suddenly stops and concentrates on something he must have forgotten without even being able to grasp what it is—but it must be something. And indeed there was something [VI 265] he had forgotten, for he had forgotten to be young and to let his heart be cheered in the manner of youth while days are still there.200

  201Then he learned to know a couple of other employees who were men of the world. They soon discovered his helplessness but yet had so much respect for his competence and knowledge that they really never let him know his deficiency. At times they invited him to go along with them for a little merriment, on little outings, to a play; he did so and it pleased him. On the other hand, the others certainly were not harmed by his company, for his shyness placed a beneficial curb on the merriment of others, so that it did not become too wild, and his purity gave the amusement itself a more elevated touch than that to which they perhaps were otherwise accustomed. But shyness is not a force that can assert itself and make its claim, and whether it was that sadness which sometimes seizes the person unacquainted with the world that stirred him to rebellion, or whatever the reason was, an excursion to the woods ended with an unusually splendid dinner party. Wanton as the two already were, his shyness was merely an incitement to them, and his own painful awareness of it incited him in turn, and all the more so as the three of them became heated with wine. Carried along by the others and overexcited, he became a completely different person—and he was in bad company. Then they also visited one of those places where, strangely enough, one pays money for a woman’s contemptibleness. What happened there, even he himself did not know.

  The following day he was dejected and dissatisfied with himself; sleep had blotted out the impressions, but he did recollect enough so that he never again sought the decent, even less the indecent, company of these friends. If he had been diligent before, he now became all the more diligent, and the pain over his friends’ having led him astray, or his having had such friends, made him even more withdrawn, to which the death of his parents also contributed.

  202His reputation with the head of the firm increased as his diligence increased. He was a very trusted employee and was already being considered for partnership in the business when he became sick, sick unto death. At the moment he was closest to death and already prepared to set foot on “the solemn bridge of eternity,” there suddenly awakened a recollection, a [VI 266] recollection of that event which up until now actually had not existed for him. In his recollection, the event took on a definite shape that for him terminated his life with the loss of his purity. He was restored to health, but when he rose from his bed cured he took along with him a possibility, and this possibility pursued him, and he pursued this possibility in his passionate investigation, and this possibility incubated in his silence, and this possibility animated the features of his face in many ways when he saw a child—and this possibility was that another being owed its life to him. And what he was seeking in his concern, what made him an old man although scarcely an adult in years,203 was this unhappy child or whether there was one; and what made him mentally disordered was that every more specific way to finding out was barred to him since the two whose company had been his ruin had long ago gone to America and vanished; and what made the disorder so dialectical was that he could never know for sure whether it was a result of the illness, a feverish hallucination, or whether death had actually come to the aid of his memory with a recollection of an actuality. This, you see, is why with bowed head he wandered that short street between eleven and twelve o’clock and the rest of the time he wandered the enormous detour along the desperate twistings of all possibilities, to find if possible a certainty, and then that for which he was seeking.

  Nevertheless, at the beginning he was well able to take care of duties at the office. He was as painstaking and punctual as ever. He looked up things in ledgers and letter copybooks, but in occasional glimpses it seemed to him that the whole thing was pointless toil204 and that there was something altogether different he should be looking for; he concluded the accounting for the year, but in occasional glimpses it struck him as a joke when he thought of his own enormous account.

  Then the head of the firm died, leaving a considerable fortune, and since he was childless and had loved the bookkeeper like a son, he also made him an heir as if he had been a son. Thereupon the bookkeeper closed the accounts and thus became a scientist.

  Now he had otium [leisure]. His troubled recollection still might not have become a fixed idea for him if life had not brought about one of those coincidences that sometimes tip the scale. The only relative he had left was an old man, his late mother’s cousin, “the cousin,” as he was called ϰατ᾽ ἐξοχην [in an eminent sense], a bachelor, to whose house he had moved after his parents’ death. He took his meals there every day, [VI 267] which he continued to do even after the firm was dissolved. The cousin delighted in a certain kind of double-entendre witticism that, as is easy to explain psychologically, is heard more frequently from the elderly than from young people. If it is true that the plain, simple word that remains when everything has been heard and most of it forgotten can acquire in the mouth of an old man a weight that it ordinarily never has, then it is also true that a double meaning, a frivolous word, in the mouth of someone advanced in years can have a disturbing effect, especially upon someone so disposed as the bookkeeper. 205Among the cousin’s witticisms that he continually repeated was the stock one that no man, not even the married man, could know for sure how many children he had. For better or for worse, this was the cousin; otherwise he was a good fellow, what is called a good mixer, fond of lively parties, but double entendres and snuff were a necessity for him. There is no doubt that the bookkeeper had many times suffered the cousin’s whole repertoire, including that particular double entendre, but he had not grasped it and had not really heard it. Now, however, it continually aimed at his tender spot, as if calculated to wound him there where his weakness and suffering were. He fell to brooding, and when the cousin’s words should have spiced the conversation, this chance contact developed the resiliency of his fixed idea so that it took hold more and more. His silence, self-inclosed as he was, and the joking of the blabber worked together upon the poor
fellow so long that eventually his understanding became earnest about making a change because it could not go on serving in such a household, and the bookkeeper exchanged understanding for mental derangement.

  In the capital there is traffic and bustling; in Christianshavn, however, a quiet peacefulness reigns. People seem unaware of the aims and goals that set the residents of the metropolis in such frantic and noisy motion, unaware of the diverse things that motivate this boisterous movement of the capital. The unfortunate bookkeeper lived in Christianshavn; literally speaking, there he had his home, and there, figuratively speaking, he was at home. But whether he tried to penetrate to the source of that recollection by way of specific historical research or by way of the enormous detour of ordinary human observations and, supported only by treacherous theories, [VI 268] wearily tried to change that unknown X into a denominated quantity, he did not find what he sought. At times it seemed to him that what he was seeking must be far away; at times it seemed so near that when the poor thanked him on behalf of the children for his rich gifts he was aware only of his own crushed condition. It seemed to him as if he were buying his freedom from the most sacred duty; it seemed to him to be the horror of horrors if a father gave alms to his own child. Therefore he wanted no gratitude lest this gratitude be a curse, but he could not stop giving, either. And rarely did the poor find so honorable and noble a benefactor, assistance on such favorable terms.

  Through some more general observations, an intelligent physician would, of course, have been able to do a great deal to remove the first possibility, which conditioned everything, and even if he, in order to make an approach in another way, had expediently admitted this as a sad certainty, with his professional knowledge he in turn would have been able, through so many possibilities, to eliminate the consequence of this certainty to such an extent that no one would be able to discern it—except the mentally disordered person, whom such treatment would perhaps only disturb. Thus possibility works in various ways. It is used as a file: if the material is hard, the sharp edge is filed off, but if the material is softer like that of a saw, then the teeth of the saw only become sharper. Every new possibility the unfortunate bookkeeper discovered sharpened the saw of concern that he was drawing all by himself and the bite of which he himself suffered. It would not have helped him if someone had wanted to help him.

  I often saw him out there when he walked on Overgaden over Vandet; and I saw him on other occasions as well, but once I met him at a local café. I soon learned that he came there on every fourteenth day in the evening. He read the newspapers, drank a glass of punch, and talked with an old ship captain206 who came regularly every evening. The captain was in his late seventies, white-haired, healthy in appearance, his vitality unimpaired; his whole person showed not a trace of—which most likely was not the case, either—of having been knocked around in life in any other way than as a sailor. How these two had become acquainted I did not know, but it was a café-relationship, and they met only there and spoke sometimes English, sometimes Danish, sometimes a mixture of both languages. The bookkeeper was a completely different person. He came through the door, greeted the old sailor in [VI 269] English, which perked him up; he looked so roguish that he was hardly recognizable. The captain’s eyes were not the best, and with the years he had lost the ability to judge people’s appearance. This explains how the bookkeeper, who was only forty years old and in this particular place appeared much younger than usual, could fool the captain into thinking he was sixty years old, a fiction he maintained. In his youth, the captain had in all decency been a jolly fellow, as a sailor may well have been, but certainly in all decency, for his countenance had such dignity and his whole character was so attractive that one would indeed dare to vouch for his life and for his dash as a sailor. Now he was indefatigable in telling lively stories about dance halls in London and escapades with the wenches, and then about India. Thereupon they clinked glasses in the course of the conversation, and the captain said, “Yes, that was in our youth; now we are old—well, maybe I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ for how old are you?” “Sixty,” answered the bookkeeper, and they clinked glasses again. —Poor bookkeeper, that was his only compensation for a lost youth, and even this compensation was like a contrasting corollary of the all too heavily brooding earnestness of his mental disorder. The whole situation had such a good humorous pattern, the deception of being sixty years old so profoundly reinforced by the English language precisely as a presupposition for the humorous, that it impressed upon me how much one can learn from a mentally disordered person.

  207Eventually the bookkeeper died. He was ill several days; and when death came in earnest and when he really had to step onto the dreadful bridge of eternity, the possibility vanished; it had been an aberration, after all. But his deeds followed him208 and the blessings of the poor along with them, and in the souls of the children remained the memories of how much he had done for them. I went to his funeral. I happened to ride back from the cemetery with the cousin. I was well aware that he had made a will and also that the cousin was far from being avaricious. Therefore I took the liberty of saying that there was something sad in his having no family to inherit whatever fortune he might have left behind, in his not having married and left children. Although really moved by the death more than I had expected, and on the whole impressing me more favorably than I had anticipated, he still could not refrain from saying: Well, my good friend, no man, not even the married man, can know for sure how many children he leaves behind him. The redeeming part for me was that it was an old saying that he perhaps was not aware of at all; the sad part was to [VI 270] have a saying like that. I have known criminals in prison who were really reformed, really had gained a vision of something higher, and whose lives testified to it, but with whom it nevertheless happened that in their earnest discussions of religion the most loathsome reminiscences were interspersed—and in such a way that they themselves were completely unaware of it.

  Langebro has its name from its length; that is, as a bridge it is long but is not much as a roadway, as one easily finds out by passing over it. Then when one is standing on the other side in Christianshavn, it in turn seems that the bridge must nevertheless be long as a roadway, because one is far, very far away from Copenhagen.

  April 6.209 Midnight.

  How dismaying it is when one is concerned about a single solitary thing and then nothing at all happens that pertains to it. There is life enough in the street, events and bustling and noise in the houses—but not a single word is heard about my affair. In the same way a haberdasher sits in his little shop on a side street and waits for customers and hears scarcely a footstep—on Østergade the boutiques are full of people. But then the haberdasher does not pay such a high rent as the rich shop-keeper does on Østergade. That is true, but I, on the other hand—I certainly pay just as stiff taxes and fees as any married man, and yet nothing happens with regard to me.

  Suppose the actor knew his role, had memorized it perfectly, felt inspired in delivery and in demeanor and was only waiting for the cue, but the prompter had fallen asleep and he could not manage to summon him!

  Suppose a lantern semaphor were set up on the other side of the strait;210 it was lighted, and the first word was legible, but then the fog rolled in and one could learn nothing without the help of the semaphor, and what one wished to know was as important as the soul’s salvation!

  Suppose the noble steed understood why it was saddled, knew that she was about to come, the equestrienne, the royal maiden, the steed’s pride, and therefore it puffed and snorted and stamped its feet, flaunting its strength so that it might please her with the sensual rapture of constraining this fiery mettle, but the groom went away and did not return, and when he finally did come the equestrienne was not with him, and yet the riding gear was not removed, but the fiery steed became afraid of losing its wind and mettle and joy of jumping [VI 271] and the satisfaction of obeying the touch of the royal equestrienne!

  Suppose Scheherazade
211 had made up a new story more entertaining than any of the previous ones; suppose that she placed all her confidence in this story, that it might save her life and not merely postpone the death verdict if she could manage to tell it as grippingly as she could at this very moment, but she was not summoned at twelve o’clock, and one o’clock drew near and she was afraid she had forgotten it or forgotten how to tell it!

  212Last evening I had the good fortune to converse with a couple clever women. It went very brilliantly, and without exaggeration I dare almost believe that my presence inspired the clever ladies. They were women of fashion, and I—I, after all, am a man of the world, that is, an intelligent but corrupt man. No wonder that such clever people are in sympathy! What a voluptuous delight to take a fling in that exultation that is a combination of laxity and witty understanding. It is so auspicious to have along in the operation someone in relation to whom one in an emergency may withdraw and say, “Good heavens, we are indeed far from approving his shabby behavior, but he certainly is clever.” Thus I learned a great deal about what it takes to have a happy erotic understanding, that when a man does not have intelligence enough to follow the emancipated creature in her lofty flight or, more correctly, in her stampeding, then it is a cross and is extremely painful to be bound—indeed, the association is really invalid. No more was said, but I do not doubt but that my heroines, who were so confident of spirit, were also willing to reverse the statement and show their sympathy to the person bound to a girl like that or rather demand that he make short work of it and find himself a more clever girl. Even a hint was dropped, obviously meant for me and obligingly intended. O silence, silence, how you can bring a person into contradiction with himself!