What Do You Read, My Lord?

Words, words, words.

Kierkegaard's legacy is a rich and complicated one--too rich and complicated to survey in any real depth here. Nevertheless, one aspect of his teaching--perhaps the most valuable of all--was his uncompromising emphasis upon the individual qua individual. As with his entire body of work, SK's own activities as a literary artist and "local character" prove to be indispensable aids to interpreting this particular strand of the data.

As a writer, Kierkegaard's productivity was, by any standards, prodigious. To describe him as "prolix" seems, almost, banal or pedestrian. Over the course of a relatively brief writing life (he died at age 42), SK spilled enough ink to fill 25 volumes in the Princeton University Press's definitive edition. There was method to his ostensible logorrhea, however; for out of this daunting mass of verbiage, SK carved an inimitable self. With passionate intensity, he gave birth to his own incomparable personality. Over against the eternal silence that mocked him from the starry heavens, Kierkegaard left his mark by constructing his own "soul" from his native Danish. His singular desire--to be remembered as "that individual"--was his greatest and most lasting achievement.

When Polonius asks Hamlet, "What do you read, my lord?" he receives an answer that evidences the contempt with which he is held by the melancholy Dane: "Words, words, words." Yet, there is perhaps more truth in Hamlet's somewhat evasive remark than is usually noticed. Hamlet is, after all, a creature of words: as a character in a play, he is words reading words. Shakespeare endowed his character with a consciousness of his own "wordiness." Indeed, both playwright and character revel in it. The same may be said of Kierkegaard's relation to his own creations.

Contrary to Walter Benjamin's weird detour into Logos Theology (in "The Task of the Translator," see previous post), what emerges from the "linguistic flux" is not a "pure language" beyond meaning but, rather, a singularity--individual as a snowflake--that imposes itself on the void. What do we read? Why, words, of course. Why do we read? To invent/discover (two sides of the same coin) ourselves. Indeed, we "coin" ourselves. And what we call "spirit" is just that: the ephemeral windiness of words. In reading and writing (again, two sides of the same coin) we match our own gusts of windiness against the prevailing winds of others. To read, as Thoreau understood, is deep religion. And what is the "Qur'an" but "a reading"?