Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  But as Periander altered, his fate also changed. The proud saying that it was better to be feared than to be pitied recoiled upon him, upon his desperate life, and upon him in death. For he came to be pitied, pitied even for having said these words, pitied because the gods, who are the stronger, worked against him, while he, more and more shattered, less and less in repentance understood their wrath.

  Melissa293 was a daughter of Procles, monarch of Epidaurus. When the mother was killed, her two sons, Cypselus and Lycophron, the one seventeen years old and the other eighteen, fled to their maternal grandfather in Epidaurus. Here they stayed for some time, and when they returned, Procles, bidding them farewell, said: Children, do you know who it was who killed your mother? The words made no impression on Cypselus, but Lycophron became silent. After his homecoming to his father’s house, he never condescended to answer his father. Periander became indignant, drove him away, and finally, by assisting Cypselus’s memory by many questions, learned what Lycophron was hiding in his silence. His wrath now pursued the exile: no one was to harbor him; it pursued the fugitive, who went from house to house until finally some friends took him in. Then Periander issued a proclamation that whoever gave shelter to Lycophron or merely spoke a word with him would die. Now no one dared to become involved with him; thus he was bound to perish of hunger and misery. Periander himself was shaken and went to him after Lycophron had had neither food nor drink for four days and nights. He invited him to become ruler of Corinth and lord of all his possessions since by now he certainly had learned what it is to defy his father. But Lycophron answered not a word; [VI 306] finally he said: “You yourself have deserved death, for you have indeed overstepped your own edict and spoken with me.” Indignant at this, Periander banished him to Corcyra, and his wrath turned on Procles, whom he conquered, imprisoned, and dispossessed of Epidaurus.

  Periander had now become an old man; weary of dominion, he wanted to relinquish it. “But it is just as dangerous to relinquish tyranny as to have it taken away.” This the wise man said, and one learns from the tyrant that it is even difficult to get rid of it. Cypselus was not qualified to rule; not even the words of Procles had made any impression on him. Consequently Lycophron should succeed him on the throne. Periander sent a messenger to him, but “No”; and finally he sent his daughter so that the compliant one might persuade the defiant one and by her temperament lead the prodigal back to respect for his father, but he remained in Corcyra. Eventually they decided to divide their estate not as father and son make division in love but as deadly enemies make division: they decided to exchange their places of residence. Periander would reside in Corcyra, and Lycophron would be ruler in Corinth. Periander was all ready for the departure, but the people of Corcyra had such a dread of him and had understood the bellicose incompatibility of the father and son so well that they decided to murder Lycophron, for then presumably Periander would stay away. And so they did. But they were not thereby saved from Periander; he had three hundred of their children carried off to be ravaged. But the gods prevented it, and Periander was so upset that he could not avenge his son that he decided to take his life.

  For the last time the wise man and the tyrant were united. His desperate resolve and fear of being overtaken in death by disgrace led his wisdom to find an ingenious escape from life. He summoned two young men and showed them a secret passage. He ordered them to come there the next night and to kill the first man they met and to bury him immediately. When the two were gone, he summoned four others and gave them the same order—to wait in the passage and when they met two young men to murder them and to bury them at once. Then he summoned double the number and gave them the [VI 307] same command—to murder the four they would encounter and bury them immediately on the spot where they felled them. Then Periander himself came at the appointed hour and was murdered.

  May 6. Morning.

  A year ago today. It goes better and better. The word is acquiring a more and more pathos-filled meaning for us. She seems tranquil. Would to God it were so! If only I had a little earlier understood myself as I do now. When that little altercatio erupted would have been the time. By being goaded, she herself perhaps would have broken off, and she would have suffered nothing at all.

  My soul is oppressed, my mind troubled, and my hope is like an overcrowded lifeboat on a stormy sea.

  But the person who is concerned about someone else does not have time really to feel his own pain, and the dreadful terrors of the imagination far outweigh the terrors of actuality. The misrelation between us shows itself here again and seems to create a new wrong against her. Her actual pain, be it ever so keen, her plaintive cry, be it ever so vehement, is still only weak compared with the inventiveness of my imagination without my having seen anything.

  May 7. Morning.

  A year ago today. The decision does not come to her suddenly. And the sudden would perhaps be most dangerous of all for her. The practicing has come so far that it was almost like a dress rehearsal. If it goes off this well in actuality, I ask no more, even though in another sense it will be rather unexplainable to me.

  As for me, I feel homesick for myself, for daring to be with myself. It is shattering to have an imagination and an actuality so contrary to each other. My troubled imagination is terrible. Must I now in turn, in a way just as tragic as it is comic, find actuality easier? Oh, that I might be permitted to keep my fancies, for I am accustomed to grappling with them.

  [VI 308] Yet it consoles me to be an eyewitness to all this; even if she were to die, I would want to be an eyewitness to it. Actuality is still not the tormentor that possibility is.

  May 8. Morning.

  A year ago today. The situation repeated, the decision as near as possible in a rehearsal, yet not without passion on her part. She seems to understand, however, that what was too coarse as a jest must be in earnest. She is not without vehemence, and that is good. It must happen even today.

  When the merchant stands at the furthest tip of the harbor and watches his ship and its rich cargo in distress and, concentrating his mind on the loss, goes away saying to himself: It is your own fault that you did not insure it—I wonder if he really would be happy if a sailor came running after him and said, “We can see the ship again; it has not gone down!”—and the merchant turned around, and the sailor took the telescope to look out there and said, “Why, now it is gone again!”

  Truly, she does mean more to me than a merchant ship and a rich cargo. It is my wish, my most fervent wish, that the whole affair may mean as little as possible to her; but even if she received with laughter the letter that will come today, even if she regarded it as joyful news that now she was free of a burden—would that it were so—but even if it were so, it would not help me. What I have experienced at the core of my being—standing at the furthest tip of possibility and seeing the most extreme terror—the result of having stood there and of seeing that sight is what will pursue me. Wound her—if I mean anything to her so that I am able to do that—I will not. I humble myself under the relationship and under my guilt, and in this way I shall take leave of her. From the rehearsals, I believe I have seen enough to know that actuality’s terror will not be such that I will evade something by not seeing it.

  I wrote a letter to her as follows: In order not to keep on rehearsing what must nevertheless happen, what, when it has happened, will certainly provide the strength that is needed—let it then have happened. Above all, forget the one who writes this; forgive a man who, even if he was capable of something, was nevertheless incapable of making a girl happy.294

  [VI 309] In the Orient, to send a silken cord is a death penalty to the recipient; in this case to send a ring is very likely a death penalty to the person who sends it.

  Now it has happened. I stagger around like a drunkard; I can scarcely walk, cannot concentrate on anything. Indeed, there is nothing on which to focus, either. These moments are really like the hyphen or dash between two words.

  What happens? My God, sh
e has been at my apartment while I was out. I find a note, composed in passionate despair—she cannot live without me, it will be the death of her if I leave her, 295she beseeches me for God’s sake, for my salvation’s sake, in memory of all that binds me, in the blessed name I rarely mention because my doubt has kept me from appropriating it, even though for that very reason my veneration for it is unmatched.

  So, then, I am wedded to her! What else does a wedding ceremony mean than that one gives love a religious expression, a religious obligation. It has happened. 296There are two powers that bind me and bind me indissolubly: the power of God and the power of one who is dead—there is no arguing with them; there is a name that will obligate me forever, even if all my thinking only remotely perceives it—that name, too, she commandeers. If these powers are obliterated, I do not exist; and if I exist, I am bound, and in these thoughts I shall constantly come to think of the one who commandeered them.

  Erotically she is in the wrong; that is certain. A girl has no right to use such means. The fact that she uses them demonstrates basically how little understanding she has of them. Truly I would not dare to use such means. The person who uses them against another binds himself just as firmly as the person he wants to bind: lest it ever be demonstrated that he has taken these sacred means in vain. But my capital crime gives her the most open account.

  But how rash to go up to my apartment! Someone may find out that she was in my apartment that day and perhaps not know that I was not at home. So now her honor may also be called in question. And I, who have carefully watched so that no such indignity would venture to come near her! It is bad enough that it will appear as if I rejected her. My only wish had been that it actually was she who rejected me. The terror [VI 310] of responsibility considerably lowers the price of direct erotic sufferings.

  And where did she go when she left here? Perhaps she ran away in a delirium, desperate over not being good enough. Good enough—that is the only thing I believe to be out of the question. O death, who gave you permission to practice usury? Or do you not practice usury worse than the most bloodthirsty Jew, worse than the most bloodthirsty miser, every time you merely threaten or merely torture a person with anxiety about death!

  So the terminus of our separation has been postponed, if for no other reasons, then for the sake of her honor, and because the whole affair has taken on a terrible shape: I have a human life on my conscience and an eternal responsibility. But what relationship am I now to have with her? 297A religious point of unity is nonsense; that we two will sorrow together is madness if I am the guilty one and she the one who suffers. How meaningless to be father confessor and murderer simultaneously, to be the one who guiltily crushes and the one who sympathetically raises up!

  No! She will see me—I have no intention of running away from anything. If she has rashly bound me for life to this relationship, fastened me with a band that she indeed can tie but cannot untie, then she may be in for something, for I am certainly going to see this through. But it does not follow that she becomes mine or I hers, but if she thinks she can make some impression on me, if she has an argument that I may not have taken into consideration—well, I will not sneak out of anything.

  Separated we are, but I will do what is humanly possible to help her. Take complete control of me, then, you formidable passion, you forger who are truth’s changeling but in the deception are not distinguishable from it. 298Brace me up for two months; that is the time, not one day more, but punctually and conscientiously that long. Change all the agony in my breast into foolishness on my lips, all the pathos therein into nonsense when it is uttered. Take away, take it away, hide every trace, every look, every feeling, every hint of a feeling that could please her, hide it all so well that no truth glimmers through the deception. Transform me; when I sit beside her, let me sit like a nodding mandarin, with a thoughtless smile on my lips, reeking of nonsense.

  I went to see her. She was relatively more calm than I had expected. —A pair of secret lovers need to be circumspect in order to conceal their understanding with each other. We, of [VI 311] course, are lovers openly and yet it is necessary for us to conceal our understanding.

  Tomorrow, then, begins the last battle, the reign of terror. I have no impression of her at all. The religious, which always has occupied me, occupied my mind to the point of despair and surely will occupy me as long as I can think, she has enlisted on her side. Perhaps it is such a ferocious skirmish that she did not know what she should think up to use against me and so she has used this. Be that as it may, I must respect it. What I shall venture to do now is to pull myself away from her, if possible, scramble her image of me into sheer inanity and utterly confound her. Every counterargument will be respected. I know very well what these will be. All sympathy for me must be wiped out, and she must also be run weary in reflection. In all human probability she will then be over the worst suffering with me and, humanly speaking, will not be inclined to begin all over again the moment I leave her. —One becomes almost calm when it is a matter of acting, even if what one will do is the most desperate and in the most difficult form—namely, in the form of time and of duration. But if I cannot be calm, then I might just as well not begin this work.

  May 8. Midnight.299

  So now all is quiet—not in the sense of the stillness acquired by a passion that is stronger than the noisiest outburst. No, it is quiet in the sense in which the merchant says that the grain market is quiet at present, there is no demand; quiet in the sense in which one says of a village that it is quiet because there is no real event and none is expected, although the usual events are taking place: the cock crows on the manure pile and the duck splashes in the water, and the midday smoke rises out of the chimney, and Morten Frandsen drives home, and everything is in motion until the farmer shuts his door and looks out into the quiet evening, for until then it was not quiet. Quiet, not in the eerie sense in which one says it of an ominous, secretive, closed-up house, but in the common-ordinary sense one says it of a house where peaceful families live, with each one taking care of the appropriate task, and everything goes on as is customary; quiet as one says it of the “quiet people in the land”300 who go about their business all week long, keep up their account books, shut up shop, and go to church on Sunday.

  The more I ponder this stillness, the more changed my nature. [VI 312] Hope for any impassioned decision has been relinquished; the whole thing presumably will go off quietly. But to me this stillness, this security, seems to be the most subtle fraud of existence. Yes, when stillness is an infinite nothing and for that very reason possibility’s capacious form for an infinite content—well, then I love it, for then it is the spirit’s element and more copious than successions to thrones and world events. This is why I love you, you stillness among the graves, for the dead are sleeping, and yet this stillness is the form for eternity’s consciousness of their deeds! This is why I love you, you stillness of the night, when nature’s innermost being more clearly discloses itself in intimations than when it loudly proclaims itself in the life and movement of all things! This is why I love you, you stillness of the witching hour here in my room, where no sound and no human voice restrict the infinity of thinking and of the thoughts, where Petrarch’s words are appropriate: The sea has not as many creatures in its waves, night has never seen as many stars in the vault of heaven, there are not as many birds in the forest or as many blades of grass in the field and meadow as my heart has thoughts every evening!301 This is why I love you, you solemn stillness before the battle; let it be the quiet of unspoken prayers, let it be the quiet of the whispered password, your stillness signifies more than does the uproar of battle! This is why I love you with a shiver, you stillness in the desert; you are more terrifying than anything that happens or has happened! This is why I love you, you stillness of solitude, more than anything that is multifarious, for you are infinite!

  But this vegetating stillness in which human life is bewitched, in which time comes and goes and is filled
with something so that there is no felt need, for all rivers flow into the sea and yet cannot fill the infinite sea, but this and that can fill up time for people—this is foreign to my soul. And yet it is this with which I must now seek to become familiar. Down there in the village lives pretty Marie. She, too, had a love affair; now the pain is over, now the musician scrapes away on the violin, and Marie is dancing with a new lover. No! No! That upsets my whole being! Let infinity separate us—my hope was that eternity would also unite us. Come, death, and keep her for eternity; come, madness, and suspend everything until eternity removes the probate court’s seal; come, hate, [VI 313] with your infinite passion; come, proud distinction, with your withering wreath of honor; come, godly piety, with your incorruptible blessedness; come, one of you, and take her whom I myself cannot take—but not this, not the dabblings of the finite. —If that happens, oh, then I am deceiving her, then I must deceive her. I steal her image as I love to see it in my imagination; I shall gaze at it, but it will not remind me of her as it formerly did when I renounced the anesthetizing relief of recollection, for then it is only a recollection.

  Alas, when we separated, my understanding taught me that I must be prepared, indeed, that I ought to expect this. Now, now it seems so difficult if it were to happen.

  But presumably it will happen—I do not know. But this I do know—that I owe it to her to accommodate myself to everything that is possible for me! And it is possible for me to give her or try to send her a more lenient explanation (and for me the decisive factor is not whether I in all human probability achieve something) of my conduct, an explanation that is abhorrent to me, more abhorrent than the most brazen lie I used when I was hoping that in an infinite sense it would be beneficial to her.

  May 12. Midnight.

  302Today I saw her. It was during the noon hour just outside Kongenshave.303 She came out from the gardens; I was walking on the other side of the street toward the gardens. It was actually my intention when I left home to go there; had it not been my intention, I would not have gone a step out of my way. Yet this scrupulousness is indeed only a leftover from a bygone method, by which, through ascetic abstinence from every, even the remotest, intervention with self-tormenting cruelty, I acknowledged the infinite in her. As far as that goes, I had never once needed the favor. So we met. She had seen me a little beforehand and thus was prepared but perhaps was also somewhat agitated. What a task for observation! To have half a minute to see, to see what will become the object of many hours of consideration! And then to have to watch myself and to be careful to include in the appraisal the impression the sight of me might make. Her face showed some movement; was it the suggestion of a suppressed pain or was it the beginning of a smile. I have never known a girl or any person in whom the expressions of the preliminaries to tears and [VI 314] laughter were so much alike as in her. And in this case the contrasts were not even so pronounced, for a stifled laugh is detectable in the movements of the muscles of the neck, and a stifled sob by the expansion of the chest, but here the doubtfulness of the relations lay in lesser contrasts, and then there was no time to look. The movement could also have been due to her drawing a deep breath in such a way, namely, that I did not see it the moment she opened her mouth but when she closed it.