To know you, Kierkegaard, in the here and now. What does that even mean? Do I wish to know you the—the person—by means of your oeuvre, or the author implied? Is there a difference? Like someone obsessed with celebrity, I have your biographies and excerpts from your personal diaries to understand your philosophical writings. Why, might you ask? Ultimately, I’m hoping to benefit from a great mind such as yours across space and time. And yet, the challenge:
After my death no one shall find in my papers (that is my consolation) the slightest enlightenment on what fundamentally filled my life, nor find the writing in my inmost being that explains everything and often makes what the world would call trifles into vastly important events to me and [vice versa] what I regard as insignificant—when I eliminate the secret note that explains it. – From The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard
A secret note, the key to your everything. I have read these words, dearest SK, multiple times, attempting to penetrate its mystery: Am I to take “secret note” literally? Did you sincerely believe that no one with the fortitude could succeed? I’m sorry, I find it hard to believe that you were consoled by the belief that no one would come to understand your inmost being by reading your papers. Let me be clear so there is no misunderstanding—I will not give up; I will continue to test your hypothesis, to push it to its very limit by getting my hands on all your oeuvre and everything written on you.
Dear SK, you wouldn’t believe it, the profound strides we humans have made in technology. How the algorithm, a finite set of instructions or rules, can gather all data related to a prolific and respected author such as yourself, essentially a blueprint, and simulate your persona with precision. Might this be the breaking of the code of your secret note? Yes, that’s right, you could not predict that you would be labeled the father of existentialism and how you have a tremendous following worldwide.
I am under no illusion that the “everything” you speak of spans infinity. For you were, after all, only human. That is why I am confident that, when pushed to its natural limits, the algorithm will get close to—if not achieve—a reliable sense of the riddle you have left for your literary progeny.
I am sorry if I sound like a madwoman. Entries from your diary have been edited and published and appear to cover the important elements in your life, including your childhood, your relationship with your father, the influence of other writers on you, your broken engagement with Regina, your celebrated quarrel with the church, and so on. If isn’t yet clear, you are my favorite philosopher, and allow me please to name you as a kindred spirit. There’s something about your persona as I view it: The melancholy, sense of dread, spiritual sensibility. Let me quote one of the passages from your diary that truly speaks to me: “64. Only when I write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in thought and am happy. If I stop for a few days, right away I become ill, overwhelmed and troubled;” My sentiments exactly. And: “such an urge, one would think, must also be a vocation from God.”
First, I lived for the spiritual. Then, I longed for the physical. Like you, I believed in God and devoted myself to the Christian cause, and at the same time, a passion, a need to write was born in me. But I no longer have God. Would you if you were standing right here before me, in the flesh, splash water in my face? I am sorry if I disappoint. I am somewhat apprehensive to go on comparing myself to you. But no doubt, I am continuously plagued by melancholy and an utter sense of dread.
I must say that I am perplexed by how entry 69. How I understood my whole activity as a writer hardly mentions your vocation as a writer but instead proffers up your “suffering close to insanity,” which you describe as rooted “in some disproportion between [your] soul and [your] body. The editor’s note explains that this disproportion, “which made it impossible” for you “to ‘realize the universal,’ crushed your “human happiness, yes, but at the same time gave [you] a unique spiritual tensile strength, made [you] an exceptional being.” You also referred to suffering as “a thorn in the flesh,” a statement attributed to the Apostle Paul. Though you don’t say it directly in this section on your activity as a writer, I suppose you didn’t want to brag about your abilities to write despite that “grievous malformation with its attendant sufferings (which undoubtedly would have caused most others to commit suicide, if they had had enough spirit left to grasp the utter misery of that torture).” Do you mean that you saw your ability to write as a gift from God? “I have understood my task to be like that of a person who himself has become unhappy and therefore—if he loves human beings—particularly desires to help others who are capable of realizing happiness.” You are my talisman, speaking the truth of my heart. I think I sometimes love human beings, and sometimes not. But one thing I am certain of is that I feel incapable of continuous happiness. I am only truly happy when I write.
Was it modesty that led you to hide away your secret gift? In the introduction to Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, you use pseudonyms. Was this to—as the editor puts it—disown authority for what you write? To “‘scramble’ the author-reader link in a way that allows the writings to enjoy a genuinely independent existence, letting them become considerations in the mind of the reader, to do there whatever work they have it in themselves to do”? According to the footnote for this quote, “for someone ready to learn,” you said, “it doesn’t matter whether he is spoken to by ‘a Balaam’s ass or a guffawing crosspatch or an apostle or an angel’.” Which means that the writing can indeed be separated from the writer.
Now at least, I don’t believe that one can entirely separate the artist from the art or the writer from the writing without in some way dimming the illumination. You see, my understanding of your philosophical writings is elucidated by reading biographies of your life. I hope that an interaction with your algorithmic avatar will help me on my journey as a spiritual writer and help to eliminate lingering self-doubt.
In your journal of 1848, I sense doubt in your previous assumption that there is a buffer between writer and writing. You attribute death with the power of redemption. You said that ‘dying is the only thing that can clear the air,’ for only then would your authorship be freed from the stumbling block of your personality. And there lies the rub: Your authorship was tied to your person.
Further, you predicted that your death would occur in your 30’s, off the mark by just a few years; nevertheless, by consensus, your death was untimely. While in the throes of death, you deemed it ‘necessary for the cause.’ What cause? By your account, the cause of your death was psychical. Do you mean you willed your own death? Could it be you died of a broken heart because your dearest Regine—with whom you chose to break—took residence far outside of Copenhagen? Two years prior to your death, you wrote nothing for a period of three months; that must have been extremely difficult for someone like you, who lived and breathed writing. Yet, paradoxically, writing grew to seem foolish to one who had grown weary of the inherent downfalls of authorship.
Like you, I have lived life with fear of death; in childhood, I perceived death as an abstraction until I didn’t. I remember two distinct episodes that proffered death as something to fear: First, I cried and ran to my parents, saying that I didn’t want them to ever die. My mother gave me my favorite treat, a Ding-Dong, to soothe me. The second episode was when I saw a powdery substance on the floor, swept some up and licked it off my fingers. When it didn’t taste sweet as I expected, I went crying to parents, weeping and worried that I might die from being poisoned.
When an adolescent, I sometimes imagined what it might be like if someone in my family were to die. My mother was the subject of my fear. I imagined her getting cancer (by then, several Jehovah’s Witness members of our congregation had died of it). I would picture what her funeral might be like, how people would feel sorry for me—that’s right, this weird pubescent fixation was about me, not the possibly-deceased.
You pinpointed the source of dread: “Anxiety arises within a person when he becomes conscious of his own freedom,” and “Some despair from too many possibilities, others from too few: When overwhelmed by thoughts of what might have been and what may come, ‘the self runs away from itself.’” Dear SK, I believe this describes me to a T. My life thus far feels like one long sprint away from my true Being. It’s time that things change.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I suspected that by imagining what if Mama were to die in just a few years, I had caused her death. My first published book —a collection of hybrid narratives—contains stories both directly and tangentially related to the workings of death. “Cabrera has death on the brain,” is how one review of my book began. It concludes on this most unenthusiastic note: “the book does not coalesce into something greater than the sum of its uneven parts.” For the anonymous reviewer, my book is me and I am my book; we are one and the same. Is it not true, SK, that you too were highly sensitive to critical reviews of your work? Did you not take attacks on your work as attacks on your person? How does one separate the two? And yet, you were optimistic that upon your death, your work would freely speak for itself and would be free of identification with you—a provocative and hated figure in your time. At least you held some status in your time. I fear that I am nothing but a mediocrity.
You saw death as victory. The Epicurean code: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And once it does come, we no longer exist.” Because I already have and always am moving beyond—dead versions of this Self—should I then consign all that I have written to the fire? I feel like I ought to, and yet.
