Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean
Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age
he was himself an inmate.
Soren Kierkegaard
At first, I thought it was about us. Well, maybe it is, oddly. We certainly like good coffee, and I've got the Roman - US fixation. Still, for erudite commentary few things beat the preacher from the City on the Hill, Gethsemene: USA. I'm interpreting that as Boston, of course; I picture a Kierkegaardian figure, strolling through Harvard Square, breakfasting at the Coop and then heading over to the Widener to read Schilling. It would be nice. But, even if he's a biker tatoo artist and meth cooker in Des Moines, the guy writes well and has a rapier for a mind...
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
Soren Kierkegaard
Speaking of rapiers, I just finished a new history of Rome. If you are curious about the place, people and times but do not have a great feel for it, and like being beaten to death by academic writing, buy it. Anyway, it clarifies a lot of things while confusing others. My favorite confusion revolves around Hadrian's Wall. The author, a Canadian classicist and historian, says that modern scholarship is not sure why Hadrian built the thing. Ahh, yeah...actually, I think it's pretty clear. Keep the bad guys out, keep the bad guys in...walls serve no other purposes. Even Sting figured that out. "I had to stop in my tracks/for fear of steping on the mines I laid."
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals
profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as
sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard
WhoisOZ cites Kant and Hume, but he is a philosopher of a different timbre. Granted, true
existentialism is hard to find these days -- Hussel's phenomonology blended with Kierkegaard doesn't save it from lots of really bad decisions. (It's 1933, and I want to be authentic, so I'm gonna be the Nazi chancellor of my university and bitch about Jews -- Martin Heidigger.) (I think I can make this curve -- Albert Camus.) (I think I'm going to go to Pakistan and figure out who killed Daniel Pearl -- Bernard Henri-Levi...opps, that was a great decision. Ok how about, I'm going to go on The Daily Show? No, that went well, too) (I'm going to fall in love with this toad look-a-like, cheap whiskey-swilling, gauloise smelling creep in complete denial of my thought and writings -- Simone de Beauvoir). (To maintain my authenticity and solidarity with the workers of the world, I'm going to stop bathing, become incontinent and write incomprehensible gibberish about Flaubert while trying to screw coeds from the Sorbonne but still depending on Simone for the necessities of life-- Jean Paul Sartre.)
Kierkegaard was the philosopher of Irony. He found the smugness of Hegelian philosophy that purported to know all and explain all irritating, yet he was the consummate Hegelian. He used the dialectic to subvert it. OZ's voice is ironic, clinically so at times and passionately so at others. I wonder what OZ writes in his sermons, since he identifies himself as a clergyman. Kierkegaard wrote deeply religious stuff at the same time he was writing brilliant criticism of Religion. I suspect that the AA concept of spirituality vice religion applies to both OZ and K.
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Soren Kierkegaard
Well, I'm going to go all authentic and existential, take care of a friend's cats and go to the gym and then to Starbucks for some iced decaf and a brie and ham sandwich. Appropriate I think to close with some more Kierkegaardian stuff...
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Soren Kierkegaard
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
Soren Kierkegaard
Be that self which one truly is.
Soren Kierkegaard
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the
light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent,
no longer limited by outward appearences.
Soren Kierkegaard
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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