I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
In the biography Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, Clare Carlisle writes:
Time is the element of subjectivity, the substance of our inner being. Our past and future are vibrant inside us. We do not experience time as an external framework or a linear sequence, like a train track on which our lives run. While we move inexorably forward, breath by breath and heartbeat by heartbeat, we circle back in recollection and race ahead of ourselves in hopes, fears and plans. By these looping, stretching movements we shape our souls, make sense of our lives—and this is precisely what I found Kierkegaard doing in his journals.
Kierkegaard was a prolific writer, doing almost all his writing in the 1840s. In addition to his many published works, he kept extensive journals and notebooks, apparently in expectation that these would be eventually published (and they were, as you can surmise given Carlisle’s mention of what she discovered there). Kierkegaard died in 1855 at only 42 years of age, cutting short a life that was both extremely difficult and very creative.
I am trying to make sense of my life also, in looping, stretching, and spiraling movements, here on this blog, like I’ve done on other blogs in the past. These are my journals and notebooks.
Kierkegaard made his life difficult for himself. He became engaged to Regine Olsen in 1840, but later broke off the engagement, thinking he made made a terrible mistake. No one knows exactly why he broke it off, though there are overlapping theories. He believed he was called to a life of solitary authorship and spiritual struggle, and thus chose subjective truth over social expectation. He struggled with depression and didn’t want to burden Regine with this. He feared domesticity and romanticized unfulfilled love. This decision made him into a tragic, suffering outsider, a role he relished. He considered it a religious sacrifice, akin to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac when God asked him to. Perhaps he had erotic and sexual anxiety, due to being brought up in a guilt-laden household. Maybe he did it as a way of launching his author career: by creating such tension in his own life, he gave himself a context for writing his great works of literature and philosophy.
I unwittingly did something similar by bringing about my divorce thirteen years ago. And, like for Kierkegaard’s ending his engagement, there is no one reason that outweighs the many influences that led me to doing it: I was unhappy with the level of emotional engagement I felt with my husband, I had met a man who provided me with both intellectual and emotional engagement far beyond any I’d experienced, I wanted escape from the constant demands of mothering my three children (which I got when we moved to a week-on-week-off 50/50 custody arrangement), I felt like my affluent life among many affluent people was lacking depth, I craved more time to myself, and I desperately needed the independence and autonomy whose development had been thwarted when I took up at age 23 with the man who would become my husband.
In making those choices and taking those steps I created a very difficult path forward for myself, like Kierkegaard created for himself. He was chastised and judged for having left Regine. Copenhagen was a small, tightly knit city in the 1840s; breaking off a formal engagement was scandalous. In the mid-1940s, he was ridiculed by the satirical literary magazine The Corsair, for his clothes, his posture, his romantic life, and his cowardice with women. Where before he enjoyed taking “people baths” walking through the streets, he became increasingly self-conscious by the notice people took of him. He seemed never to get over Regine, even leaving his papers to Regine in his will. She went on to marry but he never recovered from the love affair and never did engage in another romantic relationship.
But he also gave himself through that one decision a rich landscape of terrain to plow with his writing, philosophy, and religious thought. I did the same with my divorce, creating a rupture, a grief, an ongoing wound in my life.
Kierkegaard wrote with many pseudonyms representing different life-views such as the contrast between the aesthetic and ethical lives described in Either/Or. He believed that truth, especially of the existential variety, must be absorbed inwardly rather than handed down as doctrine. His fictional authors allowed him to debate ideas in a way that readers could more easily take in the ideas as their own.
I find this an interesting approach and I wonder if I can take it on for my writing. I’ve already considered using a pen name for my planned book about romance and dating at midlife. Should I create a specific place from which she observes and advises, versus where I do?
I’ve always wondered how people telling others how to live their lives do it without getting bogged down in “on the other hand.” I can usually see too many perspectives, and I want to put caveats on everything. Maybe that’s how Kierkegaard felt.
Kierkegaard only lived to age 42. He always thought he would die early, and this contributed to his feverish productivity of the 1840s, as well as to his breakup with Regine. He grew up in a family that he thought was cursed: his mother died relatively early, five of his six siblings died before age 34, and his father lived long but carried intense guilt and religious melancholy. He described himself as “set aside” and “chosen for suffering” by God. He lived longer than he expected, and had enough time to complete his major works.
I have always thought that I would get Alzheimer’s early. My family is generally long-lived, but two of my aunts have passed away already, one in her early seventies and the other in her early eighties. The first suffered with dementia for years before we recognized it. The second lived with it for probably a decade, with her last five years marked by no understanding, recognition of family, or even ability to feed herself.
For some reason I think that, among me and my two sisters, I will be the one this happens to (as though it can only happen to one of us! Maybe two, or three, maybe none?)
I sometimes feel a decline already. I write a blog post in the morning and in the afternoon I can hardly remember what it was about. I don’t remember events from my life that other people seem to recall easily. I am relying more and more on notes and reminders. I misplace things — putting them where they don’t belong — and then I have to retrace my steps and thoughts to find them. I make silly mistakes in my blog posts, swapping one word for another just because it is spelled similarly.
As I try to absorb philosophical ideas, I find myself forgetting what I’ve already learned. I have to repeatedly read about the philosophers I’m interested in — Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche — to remind myself who they were and what they thought.
It is not easy to say that this is happening, and it could be that I’m just being a hypochondriac, since I’ve always worried about getting demented early.
What is positive about this? That maybe I have a decade to work on my writing, my philosophical ideas, and my art. Maybe I can channel my worry into creativity, like Kierkegaard did.