The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [33]
The man, Bradley, had a certain hangdog diffuseness characteristic of the recently divorced. But he was trying against certain odds to be cheerful. He asked me about my work, he asked Esther about her work, and he listened pleasantly while we did our best to explain. These topics do not provide good conversation. He listened, though. He had large watchful eyes. I was reminded of an extremely handsome toad, a toad with class and style and good tailoring. He seemed to be living far down inside himself, perhaps in a secret passageway connected to his heart. Biochemistry does not scintillate at the dinner table, however, nor do neo-Kantian aesthetics. Only when I mentioned Kierkegaard did Bradley perk up. From behind a locked bedroom door, his dog simultaneously barked. I assumed that the dog had caught sight of the dybbuk or was interested in Kierkegaard.
Prompted by his interest, I said that Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, had fallen in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.
He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.
Esther says that when I am seated at a dinner table, plates and food in front of me, I am transmogrified into a bore. Yak yak, she says. At the table she adjusted her watchband and raised her eyebrows to me. I felt her kicking me in the shins.
Still I pressed on.
Søren Kierkegaard maintained that everyone intuits what love is, and yet it cannot be spoken of directly. Or distinctly. It falls into the category of the unknown, where plain speech is inadequate to the obscurity of the subject. Similarly, everyone experiences God, but the experience of God is so unlike the rest of our experiences that there, too, plain speech is defeated. According to Kierkegaard, nearly everyone intuits the subtlety of God, but almost no one knows how to speak of Him. This is where our troubles begin.
At this point I noticed Bradley’s attention flagging somewhat. Esther kicked me again. She glanced toward Bradley, our new neighbor. Don’t lecture the boy, she meant.
I raised my voice to keep his attention: Speaking about God is not, I said, pounding the dinner table lightly with my spoon for emphasis, the same as talking about car dealerships or Phillips screwdrivers. The salt and pepper shakers clattered. The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up — wordless, inarticulate — by denying their existence altogether, and pfffffft, they die. (They can, however, come back. Because God is a god, when He is dead, He doesn’t have to stay dead. He can come back if He chooses to. Nietzsche somehow failed to mention this.)