« Bring back the Shamrock Shake! | Main | New PulseCast coming soon. »
March 21, 2005
Monday's Required Reading: The World According to Garff
A noteworthy Updike piece in the latest New Yorker, with extended commentary on Joakim Garff's new biography of Kierkegaard. Heady stuff, a bit loquacious for a Monday night (a time when my preferred words are "Pow!" and "Bam!"), but very worthwhile for the old New Englander's thoughts on the "scandal" of radical existentialist Christianity. Updike doesn't seem to be much of a fan: "A generation before Nietzsche, God was pronounced dead as a practical matter; theism so severely preached was hard to distinguish from atheism."
But the chief reaction the article summons from me is deeper sympathy for Kierkegaard, a man whose arguments for radical decisions and divisions were sparked by a tremendous self-disgust. The piece leads to fascinating, highly personal questions: Does Christianity, a religion practiced in these parts with a languid acceptance, require full separation from human connections? Does any call to transcendence (artistic or spiritual) require a move away from people?
You can see such a move slowly happening in Kierkegaard (ironic, considering his hatred for abstraction), as he divorced himself from a doting fiance:
For nearly a year he had been going through the motions, dining with her and her parents, arranging meetings and outings, sending letters and gifts. His executors returned her letters, which she burned, but twenty-six of his survive. These letters, according to Garff, show a marked improvement in Kierkegaard’s literary art—too much so. “For by virtue of their indisputably aesthetic qualities, the letters make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer.”
In his mind, was it such a great shift from a writer to a martyr?
Well, that was a lot of words. Sorry. We'll be back to RiverCity jokes tomorrow.
| By mesh | 06:52 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/19537
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Monday's Required Reading: The World According to Garff:
