On Soren Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, a few quotations from his works

“If you wish to be and remain enthusiastic, then draw the silk curtains of facetiousness, and so hide your enthusiasm.” Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed…. That is, one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion.” — Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author

“The reason I far prefer the autumn to the spring is because in the autumn one looks up to heaven — in spring at the earth.” — Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“Most men think, talk, and write as they sleep, eat, and drink, without ever raising the question of their relation to the idea; this only happens among the very few and then that decisive moment has in the very highest degree either the power to compel (genius), or it paralyzes the individual with anxiety (irony).” — Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“Mysticism has not the patience to wait for God’s revelation.” — Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that sickness of the soul (which may be called sin) does not consume the soul, as sickness of the body consumes the body.” — Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

“There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.” -Soren Kierkegaard, Either / Or

“People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, that is, freedom of thought, and instead demand free speech as a compensation.” – Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“Luther, you have a huge responsibility, for when I look more closely, I see more and more clearly that you toppled the Pope only to enthrone ‘the public.’” — Soren Kierkegaard, in his journals

“Other people may complain that the present age is wicked. I complain that it is wretched, because it lacks passion. People’s souls are thin and flimsy like lace; and they are spiritual lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be regarded as sinful. A worm might be looked upon as sinful to think in such a way; but for people made in the image of God, ‘sinful’ is too big a word. Their desires are drab and sluggish, their passion lethargic. They are like shopkeepers, doing their duty, but clipping little pieces of gold from the coins they take. They think that, even if the Lord is careful in keeping his accounts, they can cheat him a little. Away with them! This is why my soul constantly turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. The characters are real human beings: they hate and love, they murder their enemies, they curse their descendants, they sin.” -Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Learn more about Soren Kierkegaard at the late D. Anthony Storm’s thorough commentary site.

Related articles

• The Church’s Kierkegaard tribute is hypocritical. (lindvedpress.com)
• ^!39 Daily Readings With Soren Kierkegaard (Daily Readings Series) (iumafkaa.wordpress.com)
• Rogue Philosopher, Great Communicator (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard’s legacy lives on (telegraph.co.uk)
• Introverts and Inwardness (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
• Morning Quote: Soren Kierkegaard (curmudgeons.net)

Ancient imagination: The Lion of Knidos

Sadie & me in front of the Lion of Knidos, inside the British Museum, Dec. 30, 2009

Ancient imagination: bronze dragon

Photos taken at the British Museum on Dec. 30, 2009.

Ancient imagination: Griffin armlet from 5th century BC Persia

Griffin armlet photographed at the British Museum on Jan. 8, 2010. The gold armlet dates 5th-4th century BC.

Marcus Aurelius on ancient Roman coins

Photographed at the Museum of London on January 4, 2011. (c) 2011 Colin Foote Burch

I always thought Meister Eckhart was a heretic

But apparently, he wasn’t.

The Eckhart Society has posted a page which tells the story of his relationship to the doctrinal authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, from his times to our times. Recent attempts to rehabilitate Eckhart have been considered unnecessary because only a small part of Eckhart’s writings were officially censured. Catholic authorities never ruled Eckhart to be a heretic.

Here’s a interesting quotation from Eckhart, which is posted on a page of the man’s quotations:

“Do not imagine that your reason can grow to the knowledge of God.”

The historical use of the Apocrypha and Protestant dissent

“As part of the Septuagint ‘canon,’ the Apocrypha became and still are part of the Christian Bible in both the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Roman Catholic churches. They continued to hold this position, though without definitive and formal church legislation according it to them, until the Reformation churches assigned them (at best) second-class status, on the grounds that they were books which ‘the church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners, but yet both is not apply them to establish any doctrine.’ For most of Christendom during most of Christian history, however, they were and still are simply part of the Bible. Although all the books of the Apocrypha are Jewish in origin, they have in fact played a far more important role in Christian history than in Jewish history.” — Jaroslav Pelikan, the late Yale historian of Christianity, in his book Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures

Travel photos of Matthias Church in Budapest, Hungary

This gallery contains 18 photos.

We visited the Matthias Church, on the Buda side of Budapest, on Jan. 4. Click a photo to begin a slideshow:

A travel photo gallery of Bratislava, Slovakia

This gallery contains 29 photos.

We visited Bratislava, Slovakia, on Jan. 3. Click an image to start a slide show.

Our stories, ourselves

Updated May 21, 2012

As part of his final exam assignment, a student reflected on something I had said in a creative writing class earlier this semester.

I had said, “We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

I hadn’t spent much time elaborating, but I said it during an introduction to fiction. I said it as a way to get the class to think about the characters they create for their short stories. Where do the characters think they’ve been, where do they think they are now, and where are they going? Like real life, the facts themselves are only part of the picture. How we think about the facts matters just as much — interpretation and contextualization are subjective, individual, internal acts performed by everyone, often with little conscious awareness of the process.

In his final exam essay, the student seemed to misunderstand the context for what I had said, which led me to realize I hadn’t elaborated enough. He seemed to be saying — with handwriting that wasn’t the easiest to read — that “we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” was a kind of self-deception or maybe an intentional social strategy or some kind of looney self-help slogan. But I meant it as something more basic and fundamental to our human nature, as I described above.

He was a friendly student and a good conversationalist, so I wrote him an email to clarify what I meant. I also thanked him for helping me realize I hadn’t been clear or specific enough.

The following is loosely based on the email I sent to that student, with some additions and revisions.

First, I should immediately point out (as I forgot to tell my student) that the sentence is not original. I don’t remember where I heard it first. However, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

Whenever and wherever I first had heard that phrase, I had appropriated that clause in a personal, subjective sense.

I certainly don’t think my classroom comment means that we should attempt to deceive ourselves. I did not mean that we pretend to be someone we’re not. I did not mean that we construct artifices for others’ perceptions. I did not mean that we say, “I’m Superman — if I think it, I will become it.” No, no, not at all.

What I meant was this: each person has assumptions about who he is and where he’s going. When I was a college kid, I was a depressed, guilt-ridden cloud, but I also felt pretty righteous about myself, like there were certain things I would never, ever think about doing — I had assumptions about who I was. Also as a college kid, I had certain beliefs about what the future held for me — I had assumptions about where I was going. In many cases, I’ve been proven wrong.

However, accuracy is not the point here. Humans think of their lives as stories. Each real, living person has a past he comes from (remembered in particular and subjective ways, not necessarily remembered objectively), a place we hold now (with a subjective mental and emotional context attached to that place), and a combination of beliefs and intentions directed toward our futures (a subjectively constructed set of expectations that are somewhat unique to the individual).

These individual stories have varying degrees of accuracy, but the interesting thing is that we have them, and this has utility for fiction writing.

The above view dovetails with two important factors in characterization: characters have influences and desires, or pasts and futures.

But those influences and desires, for persons real and imagined, are subjectively constructed and appropriated in memory, imagination, and expectation. Rightly or wrongly, we interpret past events and we interpret our present — and many times, we apply those interpretations to the future.

Interpretation is usually a subjective act, at least on some level. Billions of people know the World Trade Center towers came down. I interpret that as horrible. In some parts of the world, people interpret that as a good thing and a long-time-coming.

So a well-rounded character indeed is the story he tells himself about himself — and every real person also is the story he tells himself about himself. These stories aren’t so much conscious movements along an intentional plot line. Instead, they are assumptions, beliefs, and expectations that may not even be consciously acknowledged.

In this sense, a person’s narrative view of his own life is not a self-help slogan and is not a social strategy but rather something more basic, more of a default mode, like sensory perception or simply memory.

Chances are, if I told you what your future was going to be like, and my narrative of your life greatly differed from your narrative of your life, you’d get angry or annoyed — or just think I’m crazy. You’d be well within your rights to feel any number of things, even insulted!

However, sometimes, a traumatic event, a book, a counselor, or a close friend will alter some of those subjective constructions, thus opening the individual’s life to a kind of mental-and-emotion rewrite of the story — seeing the past differently, reassessing future expectations — and perhaps opening new path.

In my current Strange Days column, I write about the large number of stories in the United States right now, and how they seem to be fragmenting social and cultural cohesion.

Here’s a relevant quotation I just found (several days after I posted this entry):

“Memoir must be written because each of us must have a created version of the past. Created: that is, real, tangbile, made of the stuff of a life in place and in history. And the down side of any created thing as well: we must live with a version that attaches us to our limitations, to the inevitable subjectivity, of our points of view. We must acquiesce to our experience and our gift to transform experience into meaning and value. You tell me your story, I’ll tell you my story.” — Patricia Hampl, in her essay “Memory and Imagination”