This year's read: the pluripotent Kierkegaard

In the way the music arises from the welter of Beethoven's 9th, or perhaps more along the lines of the gentle production of patterns in a Pink Floyd prog-rock opus like Cluster One, the brimming flow of Kierkegaard's writing gives rise to personalities. If you pace it out at one book for each month, give or take, that's twelve more lives, distilled in moments of clarity and astonishment, that the year holds out for you.

So beginning with Either/Or, after a frame story about a desirable desk with a hidden compartment--how could you not be hooked?--we move into part one, the papers of the aesthetic personality. He writes about plays I've never heard of, but also idolizes Mozart's Don Giovanni; references classics I've never read, but also alludes to concepts of recollection, repetition, irony, anxiety, which are all developed elsewhere in Kierkegaard's own massive output; and in a section called the Seducer's Diary, he portrays the scenes of a love unlike anything else in literature, ad certainly unlike anything else in philosophy.

Yet what the ethical personality will point out in part two, in his letters to the younger man, seems right: it is just the nature of such experience to feel completely unique; that in itself is only the stronger attestation to its universal character. The older man, a judge, married with children, fills in the dimension of free choice of the good as a corrective to the freedom from all choice the youthful persona adores. He claims his way includes the aesthetic and brings its yearnings to fulfillment, insofar as possible within the world, through an attachment to infinite, universal concepts in the midst of everyday concreteness. In this way we are brought to the threshold of a paradox which seems to inhere within the ethical outlook: the leap of faith which will so occupy Kierkegaard throughout his remaining brief life, given over to such difficult, fascinating works of truth-seeking in creative pseudonymity.

For as the brief biographical sketch included in the front matter suggests, he gave up his chance to marry the woman he loved, presumably so as to write these books instead, seeking balance, seeking more life, seeking the true motivation or purpose of his decision in the total picture of creation. Either he indeed had faith in something greater and more capacious even than the solidly ethical life of a happy marriage and a meaningful career, or he lost heart in his own capacity to live up to all of that and had to rebuild himself painstakingly, had to re-derive a point of view or a multiplicity of them in order to find new meaning in his life; he only yearned for, but did not quite have, faith.