Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  April 15. Morning.

  A year ago today. So the weather turned out fine, even clear. If one starts out early in the morning, seeking freedom and beauty, but the weather is unsettled, one sits in the carriage like a schemer, wondering whether this fickleness can possibly show a more beautiful side so it will meet with one’s satisfaction—and then the sun itself tires of the wayward whims of the scudding clouds, of the fitfulness of the passing showers, and bursts forth in all its splendor, and now it is settled, the weather is clear—259how I do appreciate that it is now settled by her, my sun, and that the season of passing showers is over!

  The feminine immaturity with its somewhat feverish expressions seems to be forgotten. I dare to believe that I am loved. It certainly did not occur to me that she would love someone else, but she seemed to me to lack the integration that beautifies, and by its beauty penetrates the soul. The sight of it is a moment of joy comparable to the terrible moment when one sees a person who has taken poison, sees that the poison is working.

  And the pain that she could behave so wrongly gives her a gentleness I had not suspected; and that she feels this pain—what does it not prove! How fortunate that death came between us! If we had continued in conflict and settled it between and by ourselves, however amicable the decision, it would nevertheless always be dubious. But I am only afraid that she is taking the whole affair too hard. To ignore it altogether in forgetfulness could result in her being secretly pained, and if I refer to it she is immediately agitated, although I do it as kindly and as jestingly as possible; is that perhaps the reason for it?

  April 17. Morning.

  A year ago today. The trouble is that she has no religious presuppositions at all. In that respect, I have been shadowboxing. She did, however, want to be in conflict with me; she has not exactly been overcome by me, but the anxiety of that night has taught her to understand herself. She considers it a set-back, [VI 289] even though she finds herself happier than before. Here it is a matter of her freedom of infinity in relation to me. Right now she has made me ideal and is using that little deviation against herself. If only this does not develop into a weakness, a devotion to me that I cannot and do not wish to understand. I do not want to be adored; I do not believe that her unfaithfulness could wound me as deeply as the sight of this annihilation in my eyes. I myself am proud, and every person ought to be that in his relation to other human beings; toward God he ought to be humble, and humble in every respect, but not humbled under another’s personality. Really and truly, however dreadful this is, there is a kind of devotedness that precisely when it clings tightly to me will compel me to thrust it away. If it is unseemly for lovers to wrangle, then there is a devotedness that in a religious sense is a terrible responsibility.

  April 18. Midnight.

  So there is nothing whatsoever for me to do but to keep calm, for it is impossible to do something about a former love affair about which I know nothing at all. Consequently what I have done is futile, as are also 260part of my sympathetic expectation for her and my trembling for myself.

  What, then, is the good of sagacity? But I am not sagacious anyway. If in one sense I am the most sagacious of my peers, then in another sense I perhaps am the most stupid of all. In everything that I have heard and read, nothing has so hit me and struck home as what is said of Periander.261 He is said to have talked like a wise man and acted like a lunatic. That this saying fits me precisely is proved by my receiving it with the most passionate sympathy and by its nevertheless having not the slightest influence in changing me. This manner of appropriation is entirely à la Periander. Within my presupposition, I am sagacious, but the presupposition of my action is so ideal that this presupposition makes all my sagacity foolishness. If I could learn to reduce my presupposition, my sagacity would make a better showing. If I could act sagaciously in this way, I would have been married long ago. To have one’s wish fulfilled, [VI 290] in addition to receive gratitude as for a good deed, and in the next place to order things as if one essentially had freedom, this would have been sagacious, and I would have been a respectable person who does not break his given word, a husband worth seeing, who is faithful to his wife and does honor to a girl. My ideal presupposition most likely does not honor her, and that I would rather stake everything and move heaven and earth than smuggle myself into the God-pleasing state and sneak through life most likely demonstrates that I have no honor.

  My wish, which is higher than to see her free, my wish, which is the culmination of the divine frenzy in my soul, presumably must be abandoned now. But I will not do it. Once I am set free and dare to act, it would indeed still be possible that my nature could make the wish flare up in her. Let this possibility within a remote possibility, let it be infinitely remote—I still will not relinquish it and will not give it up. Only when it is officially certain that she is free and is another’s, only then is the wish dead, but until then it shall not wretchedly visit me as a whim now and then but shall be held high in honor as the highest passion of my synthesis.

  262It is indeed true that sadness is sorrow’s grace, just as despair is its fury, but one first screams in pain before daring to be sad. To become sad immediately is sometimes a mark of a base soul.

  So sleep well, my girl. He who promised you faithfulness cannot do more than he is doing. Sleep well, then—I could almost say “my dear child,” for my concern is indeed almost that of a father who craves to see his daughter in love. See, this is sadness, but I will not. I will persevere with you, will persevere even though I become an old man if nothing happens earlier. I will not call back the night watchman who stands on the look-out for the expectation.

  April 20. Morning.

  A year ago today. When an interrogator has perhaps been sitting for a long time reading documents, hearing witnesses, gathering evidence, inspecting the setting, he suddenly, sitting there in his room, sees something. It is not a human being, a new witness, it is not a corpus delicti [body of evidence]; it is a something, and he calls it: the pattern of the case. [VI 291] As soon as he has seen the pattern of the case, he, that is, an interrogator, is effective.

  I have been aware that there was a restlessness in my whole being, that something terrible was brewing; I have not slept the whole night, and now I see the pattern—alas, I see the pattern not of the case but of the annihilation. She is devoted on a scale that alarms my whole being, and yet in my eyes she is lovable and stirs me profoundly, but this devotion and my agitation are painful to me. Even if I were different from what I am, I could not understand this devotion and I could not be devoted in this way. And I who am so inclosingly reserved—she knows very little about me—what a misrelation! I gain complete power over her; she has none whatsoever over me. Is a relationship such as that a marriage? Indeed, it is like a tale of seduction. Do I, then, want to seduce her? What a loathsome notion! And is there not a still higher kind of seduction, worse than that of lust? She says she has never felt happier than she does now; she cares about nothing but her ecstasy. Is it love on my part to behold such a misrelation? And I am convinced that I am inclosingly reserved. Indeed, I must say I have come to see that my practice can lead to my being allowed to conceal my inclosed reserve. But her devotion becomes the demand that tosses my being up and down. To be sure, she actually does not comprehend this at all; but I know it, and what shall I do?

  263That misunderstanding has done irreparable harm. In her inward being she may have wanted to contend in earnest. And there is no limit to the expression of devotion as soon as it begins to express itself directly. It is like a person’s beginning to complain about his sufferings: very soon the truth no longer moves the listener, and so, unconsciously, he slips in an untruth. That misunderstanding does irreparable harm. If I look serious, she will think it is over that. And when that is not the case at all, but it is my inclosed reserve that is now making me gloomy! Ah, it is enough to make one lose one’s mind!

  Today she asked me to sit down on a chair. I did so without suspectin
g anything. Then she backed away a few steps, came up to me, and fell on her knees. No doubt there was a bit of flirtatiousness in it, but essentially there was sadness, and then a kind of bliss—yes, I may call it a demented bliss at having found a right expression for her passion. Instantly I grabbed her and lifted her up. Someone who has committed a crime looks around the room, suspecting every corner; he looks out [VI 292] the window to check the people opposite, and his anxious conscience makes him keen of eye: I do not know how much I would have paid for the certainty that no one had seen it, or how much I would have paid not to have seen it myself! Did I ask for this! Truly, she has never understood me. I myself have never bowed my knee before anyone; perhaps I could do it before her if the relationship called for it, but before her personage and before mine, it should never happen. For me such an act is no prank, no overplayed gesture; if I had done it, my opinion of it is that I would tolerate no such insult, that it was regarded in this way. Here I have my pride again.

  I certainly do realize that a girl is different from a man, but I nevertheless still do not ever forget it; it has put a frenzy into my blood, a confusion into my mind, an anxiety into my inclosing reserve, a despair into my resolve, and above all a buzzing into the ear of presentiment, which for me is a harbinger and express messenger of the last extremity.

  April 22. Midnight.

  Just as a sick person habituated to a certain medicine must take the painkilling drops along with him wherever he goes, so I, alas, must have along with me everywhere a short summary of the history of my sufferings so that I can immediately orient myself in the whole—orient myself in what I have threshed over with myself in quite another way than a pupil does his assigned lesson with the teacher. If it happens that I suddenly come to think of it—“suddenly” in this case means that there is an interval of half a day between the last time I repeated the lesson—the most terrible crisis occurs. It is something like a trace of apoplexy in relation to the physical constitution. In an instant I become dizzy; my thought cannot quickly enough grasp anything firm in the hodgepodge, and it seems to me as if I were a murderer. There is nothing to do then except to reject the idea with supreme effort as a religious spiritual trial; then the moment is over, and I once again understand what I have repeated hundreds and hundreds of times. —Or, I suddenly come to think of how much I have suffered, and the thought comes so suddenly that the supervisors of reflection are not quick enough to be able to rush over there, and I am completely overwhelmed. That happened to me yesterday. I was sitting in a café reading a newspaper; suddenly that idea awakened in my soul, so suddenly that I burst into tears. Fortunately there was no one present, but I learned new caution.

  April 24. Morning. [VI 293]

  A year ago today. I have gone astray; I am like someone who has come into a strange country where people speak another language and have other customs. Now, if my suffering were that the strangers treated me with national pride, that would be all right. But that is not my situation. She is very far from making any demands upon me; absorbed in her illusion, she sees in it only her illusion. She is happy, she says; I do believe her to be happy in a certain sense. She is lovable and busies herself with her love like a child who shifts for itself but is merry and happy at its pastime. One could sit and watch her and grow old and go on watching her—there is only one dubious aspect—and that is that I am the object of her love. Everything prior to that little altercatio [dispute] which to me had so much meaning: the impact of the idea to which I, yielding myself to the idea, tried to draw her attention—this has not touched her at all. In this respect, she is, so to speak, insensitive. But the conflict, my changed behavior, the intervention of death, transforms her nature; she is displaying a lovableness I sadly admire and that makes me an enthusiast to her. And what, then, does this mean? It means that she has no sensitivity whatsoever to the motives I consider to be supreme. There is a language difference between us, a world between us, a distance that now manifests itself in all its pain.

  April 25. Midnight.

  Patience!

  April 26. Morning.

  A year ago today. So it is upon this rock I am to be wrecked! I have never humbled myself before any human being; neither have I exactly wanted to behave with arrogance. My view of my relation to people was to let everyone be given his due and then period. On the whole, I have not had much to do with people in a more intimate sense. My spiritual existence has occupied me too much. Here I have been humbled. And who is it who humbles me? It is a young girl, and it is not by her pride, for then we could have managed all right, but by her devotedness.

  [VI 294] Happy with me she will never be—no, never! It is possible that she can make herself believe it, but I do not understand it, and that, too, certainly belongs to her happiness. And if we are united, it will eventually come to the point where she will someday sense with terror what I ought to have prevented.

  To preserve my inclosing reserve in relation to her is easy enough—perhaps that is why I feel the humiliation right now.

  What to me is the vital force of my spiritual existence—equality in the essentially human—she destroys. She does not care at all about the infinite passion of this freedom; she has erected an illusion, and she is satisfied with that. I, too, believe that one can love, can sacrifice everything for one’s love, but whether I am going to see good days or am going to risk my life, the deepest breathing [Aandedræt] of my spirit-existence [Aands-Existents] I cannot do without, I cannot sacrifice, because that is a contradiction, since without it I indeed am not. And she feels no need for this breathing.

  Yet I feel precisely now that I love her, love her more than ever, and yet I dare not, I who am engaged to marry her, who indeed, please note, am obliged to love her.

  April 27. Midnight.

  I have no desire to record anything, nor is there anything. Yet I am just as much on the alert. Here in the city the night watchmen show that they are on duty by shouting. Why this shouting? In England they walk in utter silence and put a pellet into a box, and in the morning the supervisor sees whether they have been on duty and have not slept.264

  April 28. Morning.

  A year ago today. If only she could put up some resistance to me. When I fight I am lighthearted, and even when I live in peace, I want the one with whom I am keeping the peace to be just as strong as or stronger than I am. The more she surrenders herself, the more responsibility I have. And I am afraid of the responsibility. Why? Because then I have myself to deal with, and this conflict I always fear. If God himself were what is called a man, someone outside oneself with whom one could speak and to whom one could say: Now let’s hear what you have to say, and then you will soon see what I can think of—well, then we could manage all right. But he is the strongest of all, the only strong one, because he simply [VI 295] does not speak that way with a person. The person with whom he wants to be briefly involved he takes hold of in such a way that he speaks to him through the person himself. Their conversation is not a pro and contra exterior to each other, but when God speaks he uses the person to whom he is speaking, he speaks to the person through the person himself. This is why he has the power and at any moment he wishes can crush a person. But if it were so that God had once and for all spoken, for example in Scripture, then, far from being the most powerful, God would be in the tightest squeeze, for a person can easily argue with something like this if he is allowed to use himself against it. But such an assumption is an airy notion without any basis, for this is not the way God speaks. He speaks to each individuality, and the instant he speaks to him, he uses the individual himself in order to say through him what he wants to say to him. Therefore in Job it is a weakness in the plot that God appears in the clouds265 and also speaks like the most skillful of dialecticians, for what makes God that frightful dialectician is that one has him in a quite different way at close quarters, and here the softest whisper is more blessed and the softest whisper is more terrible than to see him on the throne in the clouds or to hear h
im in the thunder over the earth. This is why one cannot utilize the dialectical with him, for God uses the very dialectical power of the person involved precisely against this person himself.

  When an individual fears God, he fears what is greater than himself, and next to this fear is the fear of himself, and the angustiae [narrow pass] of this fear is responsibility.

  The more she surrenders herself, the unhappier I become. Is this a happy alliance? And what, indeed, is her happiness? Seen from my standpoint, it is the happiness of blind enchantment, of illusion. But Socrates says that being in an illusion is the greatest unhappiness.266

  April 29. Midnight.

  267The question remains whether or not I could give her a more lenient conception of myself. If she sometimes thinks of [VI 296] me at all, of which there surely is a sad probability, then I do indeed realize what she in all human probability might need. The explanation presumably would go something like this: “To a certain extent I was a corrupt man, yet not totally bad; I had my good sides as well. I certainly have loved her but lacked earnestness. And then there was my instability, which cannot hold firmly to a resolution. I certainly did regard her as a charming girl but still did not find in her the spirit with which I could become happy. It is therefore beautiful of her to resign herself to her fate. It is magnanimous of her to be reconciled to the girl who some day will captivate me with a greater power: for this much is sure, that if he ever finds a more brilliant girl, he will find no one who would love him in this way. This he himself certainly must admit, and, as far as that goes, he certainly has also repented of his conduct, even though he is too proud to undo anything.” —A repenting individuality who repents but is too proud to undo anything he has done wrong when it still can be undone—God knows what repentance is then!