Fear and Trembling

genero81

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I'm reading this book for an upcoming meetup. I thought I would share this excerpt about faith. With all the craziness going on, it seems apropos enough.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something. I am not concerned with this. But if I knew where such a knight of faith lived I would journey to him on foot, for this marvel concerns me absolutely. I would not let him slip one instant, but watch every minute how he makes the movements; I would consider myself maintained for life and divide my time between looking at him and practising the movements myself, thus devoting all my time to admiring him. As I said, I haven’t found such a one; still, I can very well imagine him. Here he is. The acquaintance is struck, I am introduced. The moment I first set eyes on him I thrust him away, jump back, clasp my hands together and say half aloud: ‘Good God! Is this the person, is it really him? He looks just like a tax-gatherer.’ Yet it is indeed him. I come a little closer, watch the least movement in case some small, incongruous optical telegraphic message from the infinite should appear, a glance, expression, gesture, a sadness, a smile betraying the infinite by its incongruity with the finite. No! I examine him from top to toe, in case there should be some crack through which the infinite peeped out. No! He is solid through and through. His stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to finitude, no smartly turned-out townsman taking a stroll out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground with surer foot; he belongs altogether to the world, no petit bourgeois belongs to it more. One detects nothing of the strangeness and superiority that mark the knight of the infinite. This man takes pleasure, takes part, in everything, and whenever one catches him occupied with something his engagement has the persistence of the worldly person whose soul is wrapped up in such things. He minds his affairs. To see him at them you would think he was some pen-pusher who had lost his soul to Italian bookkeeping, so attentive to detail is he. He takes a holiday on Sundays. He goes to church. No heavenly glance or any other sign of the incommensurable betrays him; if one didn’t know him it would be impossible to set him apart from the rest of the crowd; for at most his hearty, lusty psalm-singing proves that he has a good set of lungs. In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods. He delights in everything he sees, in the thronging humanity, the new omnibuses,43 the Sound – to run across him on Strandveien you would think he was a shopkeeper having his fling, such is his way of taking pleasure; for he is not a poet and I have sought in vain to prise out of him the secret of any poetic incommensurability. Towards evening he goes home, his step tireless as a postman’s. On the way it occurs to him that his wife will surely have some special little warm dish for his return, for example roast head of lamb with vegetables. If he were to meet a kindred spirit, he could continue as far as Østerport so as to converse with him about this dish with a passion befitting a restaurateur. As it happens he hasn’t a penny and yet he firmly believes his wife has that delicacy waiting for him. If she has, to see him eat it would be a sight for superior people to envy and for plain folk to be inspired by, for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. If his wife doesn’t have the dish, curiously enough he is exactly the same. On the road he passes a building-site and meets another man. They talk together for a moment, he has a building raised in a jiffy, having all that’s needed for that. The stranger leaves him thinking: ‘That must have been a capitalist,’ while my admirable knight thinks: ‘Yes, if it came to that I could surely manage it.’ He takes his ease at an open window and looks down on the square where he lives, at everything that goes on – a rat slipping under a board over the gutter, the children at play – with a composure befitting a sixteen-year-old girl. And yet he is no genius; I have tried in vain to spy out in him the incommensurability of the genius. He smokes his pipe in the evening: to see him you would swear it was the cheesemonger opposite vegetating in the dusk. Carefree as a devil-may-care good-for-nothing, he hasn’t a worry in the world, and yet he purchases every moment that he lives, ‘redeeming the seasonable time’ at the dearest price;44 not the least thing does he do except on the strength of the absurd. And yet, and yet – yes, it could drive me to fury, out of envy if for no other reason – and yet this man has made and is at every moment making the movement of infinity. He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence, he knows the bliss of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever is most precious in the world, and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher, for his remaining in the finite bore no trace of a stunted, anxious training, and still he has this sense of being secure to take pleasure in it, as though it were the most certain thing of all. And yet, and yet the whole earthly form he presents is a new creation on the strength of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he makes it with such accuracy and poise that he is continually getting finitude out of it, and not for a second would one suspect anything else. It is said that the dancer’s hardest task is to leap straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it – but that knight does it. The mass of humans live disheartened lives of earthly sorrow and joy, these are the sitters-out who will not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers too and they have elevation. They make the upward movement and fall down again, and this too is no unhappy pastime, nor ungracious to behold. But when they come down they cannot assume the position straightaway, they waver an instant and the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers in the world. This may be more or less evident, depending on their skill, but even the most skilled of these knights cannot hide the vacillation. One doesn’t need to see them in the air, one only has to see them the moment they come and have come to earth to recognize them. But to be able to land in just that way, and in the same second to look as though one was up and walking, to transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the pedestrian absolutely – that is something only the knight of faith can do – and it is the one and only marvel. Yet this marvel can so easily deceive.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling (Classics) . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
 
So the knight makes the movement, but what movement? Does he want to forget the whole thing? Because in that too there is a kind of concentration. No! for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole of one’s life’s content and still be the same. He has no inclination to become another, seeing nothing at all great in that prospect. Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has altogether forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it can so completely forget in turn that it was a butterfly that it can become a fish. Deeper natures never forget themselves and never become something other than they were. So the knight will remember everything; but the memory is precisely the pain, and yet in his infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. His love for the princess would take on for him the expression of an eternal love, would acquire a religious character, be transfigured into a love for the eternal being which, although it denied fulfilment, still reconciled him once more in the eternal consciousness of his love’s validity in an eternal form that no reality can take from him. Fools and young people talk about everything being possible for a human being. But that is a great mistake. Everything is possible spiritually speaking, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible. This impossibility the knight nevertheless makes possible by his expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by renouncing it. The desire which would convey him out into reality, but came to grief on an impossibility, now bends inwards but is not lost thereby nor forgotten. At times it is the unconscious workings of the desire in him which awaken the memory, at others it is he himself that awakens it, for he is too proud to want to let the whole content of his life seem to have been but a fleeting affair of the moment.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling (Classics) . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
 
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