Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  If she is perhaps suffering because her breast is so oppressed by stifled sighs, because she cannot cry, then my consciousness likewise suffers from not being able to exhale but groans under stifled thoughts and perishes in meaninglessness. Just as the fish when it lies on the shore gasps in vain for the sea in which it can breathe, so I gasp in vain for meaning.

  She is suffering—that is obvious, and the person who sees it is I! No one else suspects what is taking place between us. As soon as someone else is around, my manner is as usual. She is quiet, and I keep vigil with a hundred eyes on every word that is spoken lest there suddenly be an explosion. She would find relief in talking to someone, but it would merely be a cooling off, and the worst symptoms would perhaps come over her in solitude; she is much better off to persevere with me.

  373A casual remark can be most disturbing. Just when one has calculatingly covered everything, a remark may suddenly be dropped that hits close to home without one’s anticipating it. Yesterday we were at a party. At the dinner table there was talk about engagements. One of the ladies made the comment that “engaged people always become thin.” How δειϰτιϰω̃ς [close to home]! For her and for me it was a shattering truth. As I was about to draw attention away from this subject lest further use be made of this empirical maxim, a gentleman went on to say, “But in recompense one usually takes on weight when one is married.” The poor girl. I managed, however, to keep my composure enough to add as lightly as a heavily armed person can, “But yet there are examples to the [VI 347] contrary,” and when I mentioned a man’s name that was enough to provoke laughter, I said, “He has been married three times, and yet he is thinner than I am.” People deigned to laugh; she had time to collect herself. But a torture such as that is ruinous to both soul and body.

  She is, however, and continues to be unresigned. She bids lower and lower, but to perceive the task sympathetically does not occur to her at all. When she is willing to throw herself away as a slave girl, as a nothing, as a burden, she thinks that she is carrying resignation to the limit. God knows that in this way it is indeed being carried infinitely much further than I could bear to see it. On the other hand, she either cannot or will not understand what she should do and that she is torturing me unjustly, since for one thing there has never been contention about her lovableness, and for another, that kind of behavior strengthens me in my resolve precisely out of my concern for her.

  What I fear most of all is that she nevertheless has built me up in her imagination as something important. If that is the case, this humiliation is the worst of all disasters. Here I have found a limit to my deception. If I were to speak in the form of nonsense about my unimportance, then I am only strengthening such a fancy, if it exists. Thus, just as once a week I earnestly urge her to break the engagement, so I have also opened a little communication with my inner being in regard to the latest mistake. Next to becoming her benefactor ranks the absurdity that I am supposed to be something important and disdain her. It is only momentary, for as soon as I have said that she is always good enough, the nonsense begins again. In this regard, I console myself that when I have left her everyone will confirm her opinion that it was no great loss. With regard to my callousness in treating her this way, she will, I hope, also find corroboration in everyone’s judgment of me.

  It would be superb if she herself could be brought or if it would occur to her to break the connection, for then she would be spared the humiliation. I drop hints about it, for I do not dare to speak of it with full voice and total passion; then she would discover how much she preoccupies me and then she would try all means once again; for this reason I must speak with muted voice and false passion.

  [VI 348] June 14. Midnight.

  374In the Middle Ages a person saved his soul by telling his beads a certain number of times; if in a similar manner I could save my soul by repeating to myself the story of my sufferings, I would have been saved a long time ago. If my repetition is perhaps not always imploring, ah, it nevertheless preferably ends in this final solace. She helps me with that in a singular way. If I did not have to keep myself in the passion of action, if it were all over and I were quiet—that is, at rest dared to reflect on the whole affair—then I would say that she has benefited me in that I, humbled by seeing her prostrate herself before me, find all the more joy in prostrating myself before a higher one. Her misfortune was that she had nothing higher than a human being. Just as Scripture says that an idol has no real existence in the world,375 so it may well be that I end up as a nonentity simply because I was an idol to her.

  But how strange it all was. It is so dialectically deceptive that it seems as if I could lose track of it at any minute, as if I had not left her because I loved her but because I loved myself! I find everything to be just as I wished it, all her surroundings just as I had imagined them after the ordeal. They suit me as no others do; I could travel around the world and perhaps not find any so favorable to me. If a step prior to a marriage is required, a rational deliberation, then I dare to say that I have proceeded by trial and error. I did not, however, wish by any means to offend her by reconnoitering. I find her somewhat different than I imagined; a little scene lends us a helping hand, and to my eyes she becomes more lovable than ever—and look, then all the difficulty stems from me. But then am I perhaps rash? 376All my earlier (prior to the step) deliberation upon her circumstances and upon the family’s individuality proves the exact opposite; and I dare to testify on my own behalf that I entered into the relationship with the most honest will, convinced that I knew the nature of the task, perhaps a little proud of being able to accomplish it: to control my inclosing reserve—and behold, I am shipwrecked precisely on that, not in such a way that I cannot do it, but in such a way that this proves not to be the task. After that little incident [Begivenhed], her devotion [Hengivenhed] becomes more and more reckless in its expression and demonstrates to me precisely that my inclosing reserve is an absolute misrelation, that her relationship with me 377will become a misalliance for her, [VI 349] even if she does not understand it. That this is the way things stand is my pain, and yet I cannot renounce my inclosing reserve for that reason. If I have taken fifteen years to form a view of life for myself and to mature in it, a view of life that both inspired me and was altogether compatible with my nature, I cannot suddenly be altered in this way. Indeed, I cannot even tell her that I wished it, because such a wish is a thoroughly indefinite stipulation, and it would be very irresponsible to use it to have her life at one’s disposal. Insofar as she has struggled with all her might to show her devotion, she has worked against herself with all her vitality.

  And now I realize clearly that my depression makes it impossible for me to have a confidant, and I of course know that what the wedding ceremony would require of me is that she should be the one. 378But she would never have become that even if I had opened myself ever so much, for we do not understand each other. This is because my consciousness has one more extension. According to the intermediate court, which actually is the court of everyday life or of actuality, according to the intermediate court where she essentially has her life, as indeed the majority have, I am out of my mind. Only by a long roundabout way do I become once again, in a higher sense, calm and secure like other men. Mentally disordered I am not, for I can take care of myself very well. I need no confidant, and I burden no one with my unhappiness; neither does it disturb me in my work. My depression hunts for the terrifying in all directions. Now it seizes me with all its dreadfulness. 379Flee from it, I cannot and will not—I must bear the thought; then I find a religious reassurance, and only then am I free and happy as spirit. Although I have the most inspired conception of God’s love, I also have the conception that he is not an old fussbudget who sits in heaven and humors us, but that in time and temporality one must be prepared to suffer everything. It is my conviction that it is only a Judaizing relic, a truncated particularism in Christianity, or ordinary cowardliness and laziness that has the idea of being in relat
ionship with God and of being exempted from such things. Officious spiritual or secular advice about keeping the terrible away is simply nauseating to me, because this advice does not understand what the terrible is. Indeed, anyone who is busy willing or became great by willing something in this finite world does well to keep and has been compelled to keep the terrible away, lest it change him and his goal into nothing or hinder him [VI 350] from attaining the fancied greatness. But the person who wills religiously must have receptivity precisely for the terrible; he must open himself to it and needs only to take care that he does not stop halfway, but that it leads him into the security of the infinite. This takes place gradually with each instance of the terrible. He becomes intimate with it, intimate with the thought that what he most fears will happen to him, but he also becomes expert in practicing this thought in his assurance of God’s love. Hence the thought perhaps visits him off and on, but it stays only a minute; in that very instant he is religiously oriented in it, and the whole thing does not disturb him. But then comes another terror, and he does not maunder about it to others but tends to his work, and he succeeds also with this etc.

  If she had become mine, I am sure that on the wedding day I would stand beside her with the thought that one of us would die before evening, or with some such gloomy notion. I guarantee that neither she nor anyone else would notice it in my countenance. I would also be inwardly at peace, but religiously at peace, and yet I would still have the thought. This, you see, is a deception! If I did have a confidant, I would ask him something like this: “Isn’t it a shame for a person who is depressed to torture his wife with his depressing ideas?” And he would answer, and along with him perhaps everyone else, “Yes, indeed! A man ought to constrain himself and thereby show that he is a man.” “Fine,” I would answer, “I can do just that, I can look like a smiling hope. And yet it is precisely on this that I am stranded, for it is a deception that marriage does not tolerate, 380whether the respective wife understands it or not.” And the trouble is that I myself believed this was the task until I began to realize that the wedding ceremony is a divine protest against it.

  Speak with a confidant, that I cannot do. A confidant will not think my depressing idea with the same passion as I do, and consequently he will not understand, either, that for me it becomes a religious point of departure. To live confidentially with another person requires either that one not have such thoughts, that one’s world of consciousness end at the scarcely Greek, even less Christian, systematic board fence—the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer381—or that one not have them on such a large scale that they do not retreat before what is called reasonable grounds. In other words, [VI 351] most people have a fractional idea of life’s fraudulence, but then along come experience and probability etc. and patch the pieces together, and then they are safe and secure and have reasonable grounds for it. Of this I am personally well informed. An elderly woman once picked up the idea that she would be buried alive. She confided in me. Sure enough, she had thought up three precautionary measures, but since she was depressively worried, her worry had in turn quite naturally deprived her of all three—that is, she could conceive of the possibility that they were not adequate. Now, if she had not been depressed, she would have become happy in the assurance that there are such prudential measures and priceless truths that are able to guarantee a person something in the finite world. Now I was obliged to make her happy in this nonsense, for since I realized that the infinite would perhaps upset her completely, I chose the finite. I myself had once been plagued with the same idea and was richly supplied with precautions. This overabundance had not helped me, for my depression had taken it away from me—until I found comfort in the infinite. I then thought up the fourth and fifth precautionary measures of which she had not dreamed, and she was helped and has continually thanked me; but I have never known whether I should laugh or cry over it.

  What if I were married and my wife were my confidant—what then? I shall assume that it is in the time of suffering before I became mature and that it was that old woman’s depressing notion that plagued me. Then I would speak and initiate her into it. She would really laugh now, for sure, because it would be inconceivable to her where anybody could pick up such notions. Now, if for me my depression were not continually the point of departure for a religious fulfillment, if it were an empty caprice that ended in nothing, then perhaps this innocent laughter would be the very best cure, for a charming youthfulness does have considerable power. But for me the religious fulfillment is worth more than all youthfulness, and therefore it would not help me except to help me find sad pleasure in her happiness, which I nevertheless do not crave. But I must speak, for being silent was for me the easiest. Then she probably would become worried and would try her hand at the reasonable grounds. Suppose she thinks up five precautionary measures, and now it is her dialectic that is to take the wind out of my sails. The whole thing becomes so clear to me that I want to hear her voice in order positively to assure myself that I have done the right thing in keeping myself from hearing it. Then she would name the four precautionary measures and would say: And finally you do have me, [VI 352] I who would indeed do everything for you, believe me, if it would dispel those dark thoughts; believe me, I promise you that it will not happen; everything will be done as if my soul’s salvation depended on this matter—and therefore be happy again. It seems to me that this situation would be enough to make stones cry. The poor wife! She has thought of everything she could imagine. If I contradict her, she thinks I do not have confidence in her that she is what she wishes to appear to be, and this grieves her; and then on the other hand, this is the dialectic that is supposed to bind me. Even the simplest objection, one that will occur to anybody—that she could die before I do—she would not understand, for precisely because it is essentially her nature to expect everything happy and in this hope and faith and confidence of immediacy she has her assurance in life, she would be speaking most sincerely if she said: How can you believe that! That I should die before you—now I know how important it is to you etc. Once again she would make stones cry by her genuine fervent emotion, but then on the other hand, this is the dialectic that is supposed to bind the one who for fifteen years day and night has improved himself in handling thoughts dialectically, just as the Arab handles the snorting steed, as the juggler plays with sharp knives.

  What would the result be? That I could not bear to see her distressed, could not have the heart to let her go away feeling the indignity of my not having trusted her. And what then? Then I would let a day go by, would put on my disguise, look as friendly as possible, and say to her, “Yes, my dear, it is as you said, I do have you, and you have convinced me, if not by your reasons, then by what you said about yourself.” And then she will look so happy and contented, she, my eyes’ beloved delight—and I would have deceived her. And this I cannot bear, because if I were in her place I could not bear it, and because I will and must honor her by loving her as much as I love myself, which I can do only by leaving her. With regard to others, the deception is permissible, for they are not bound to me, are not divinely installed as my confidants, and if they are weary of me, they can, of course, go, which she cannot do if she ever dimly realizes the misrelation.

  If I actually were calmed when I spoke this way to her, it would make no difference to the matter at hand, for if I had been calm, I would have been that within myself. In that case the misrelation is again evident. For her a depressing idea cannot acquire the significance of becoming the point of departure [VI 353] for a religious fulfillment. If she were to have one opinion about a drama and I another, if the difference in opinion perhaps showed that I was an estheticist and she anything but that, it would have nothing at all to do with the basis of a misrelation, and if it were based on that, I would gladly surrender my opinion for her sake. But the singular ideas of depression I do not surrender, for these ideas that a third person perhaps would call whims and she perhaps would sympathetically call sad fan
cies I call reminders: if I just follow them and endure them they lead me to the eternal certitude of the infinite.

  Thus in my solitude these ideas are precious to me even though they terrify me; they have great significance for me and teach me—instead of wanting to congratulate myself on matchless discoveries382 in the sphere of the religious and to make mankind blissful with them—to discover, as it were, to my own abasement, the most simple things and to be infinitely satisfied with them. —Furthermore, implicit in the concept of the fear of God is the idea that one is to fear him; and if it is dangerous for a person’s soul to make God into a despot, then it is also dangerous for his piety to speculate God into a subordinate servant, and if it is troubling to a person’s soul if God were inclosed in eternal silence, then it is also dangerous to revise God’s accounts speculatively or to parade prophetically into world history.383 Indeed, why is it that there is more fear of God in the out-of-the-way places where there are two or three miles between each little cottage than in the noisy cities, that the sailor has more fear of God than the inhabitant of a market town,384 why, indeed, unless it is that these people experience something and experience it in such a way that there are no escapes. When the storm rages in the night and in it the hungry howling of the wolves sounds forebodingly, when someone in distress at sea has saved himself on a plank—that is, has to be rescued by a straw from certain ruin, and consequently one cannot send a message to the next cottage because no one dares to venture out into the night, and thus one can save one’s shouts: then one learns to be content with something other than confidence in night watchmen and policemen and the efficacy of distress signals. In big cities both people and buildings are packed in together much too tightly.