Diary of a Seducer I

When this piece of writing is analyzed in the full context of Kierkegaard’s life, the multiplicity of layers involved makes me dizzy. So I’ll start with a straightforward analysis/outline, and see what develops from this.

We found the personal and private diary of a man named Johannes. We couldn’t help ourselves from reading it, and what we read greatly disturbed our spirit.

Johannes’ life had been an attempt to realize the task of living poetically. With a keenly developed sense of what is interesting in life, he had known how to find it, and having found it he had constantly reproduced this experience in a semi-poetic way. Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing roughly in the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter. Many people who appear bodily in the real world do not belong there but to this other world.

Before we talk in depth about Johannes and his deeds, we’ll pause to take a look at the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically the ones from his book Beyond Good and Evil. Here we are encouraged to transcend the ethical categories of good and evil, to reclaim and remaster the unrestricted ancient Greek worldview of the aesthetic categories of good and bad.

There is a near infinite complexity in the distinction between evil and bad. A general statement we can make, is that they are concerned primarily with different things. If you declare a painting to be evil, you should expect those around you to be confused about what exactly you meant. If you declare a decision to be bad, there is again a certain ambiguity in your meaning. Did the decision put you at a disadvantage, or did it harm someone else? Does the decision embarrass you when others find out about it, or are you afraid of being arrested for it? This ambiguity is the space in which we witness the clash between aesthetic and ethical considerations.

… his poetic temperament, which is, if you will, not rich, or if you prefer, not poor enough to distinguish poetry and reality from eachother.

Johannes, April 4th Be careful, beautiful stranger! It can be dangerous to step off the coach. I once knew a lady who, in stepping off her coach, got herself into such a tangle that this step became decisive for her whole life. It’s dark, I won’t disturb you. I watch bashfully, underneath the street light. As you’re about to enter your front door, I receive a sidelong glance. I see exasperation, a proud contempt; I see a prayer, a tear in your eye. Both are equally beautiful, both I accept as my due, for I can be just as easily one thing as the other. Ah, to be seventeen! One goes shopping at such a happy age, to lay one’s hand on every item gives one an inexpressible joy, easily forgotten.

In the shop of life, Cordelia stands opposite a mirror. The mirror, the humble slave who, although she means something to him, means nothing to her. Though he dares grasp her, he dares not comprehend her. The unhappy mirror, which captures her image, but not her; who cannot hide her image in secret depths, hide it from the world, but must, on the contrary, betray it to others.

What agony if a man were so made!

And yet aren’t there many who are made thus, who own nothing except in the instant when they show it to others, who grasp the surface only, not the substance, who lose everything when the substance itself wants to appear, as this mirror would lose her image if she were, in a single breath, to betray her heart to it?

Her head is a perfect oval, her dark hair closes gently above her brow. Her skin is transparent, velvet to the touch, I can feel it with my eyes. She removes her glove to reveal a splendid right hand, without a ring on the fourth finger. She buys an item, hiding it away in secrecy, surely to surprise a special sweetheart. Alas, there are many who are not engaged and yet have a sweetheart, many who are engaged and still have no sweetheart…

No impatience, no greediness, everything will be savored in slow droughts; she is earmarked and she will no doubt be brought in.